Sasson & Bin Laden, Growing Up Bin Laden

Jean Sasson with Najwa & Omar Bin Laden
Growing Up Bin Laden: Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World
2009

The Following review received a neat endorsement from the author herself when it appeared originally on my other blog Mark McLaughlin Online. To read the endorsement click here.

THOSE that maintain fictional novels more entertaining or diverting than non-fiction – particularly “heavy” non-fiction on terrorism, Islam and geopolitics – should read Growing Up Bin Laden.

There are those who would never consider reading a book with Bin Laden’s name on the cover, but think nothing of devouring Khaled Hosseini’s fictional Afghan tales The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns because they saw them on Richard & Judy.

Growing Up Bin Laden seems tailor-made for such reading groups. It looks, feels and reads like a Hosseini novel and confirms that many of his semi-fictional plot devices [coming of age in an Afghan war zone / dodging male-rape gangs / living with an austere and abusive husband and father] to be based in fact.


“There was a sickening incident when [my friend]...was abducted and brutally gang raped. The rapists added insult to injury by snapping photographs of the young man during and after the rape.

“Those damning photographs ended up in the hand of Dr. [Ayman] Zawahiri, the leader of the al-Jihad group [and later founder member of Al-Qaida]. Zawahiri was incensed, believing that the young teenage boy was somehow at fault. There were pictures to prove it! In our world, sex between men is punishable by death...He was arrested by the group leaders, put on trial, and condemned to death.” (Omar Bin Laden)


“My brothers and I all suffered from asthma...but my father was adamant that we should not take modern prescription drugs, no matter how serious our affliction...
“After only a month in Jalalabad, [Osama] announced that we were travelling to Tora Bora [the Bin Ladins’ Afghan mountain home with a name that means ‘Black Dust’].

“I was foolish not to have sneaked my medicine past my father, for my breathing difficulties were becoming worse with each passing day...Once when gasping, I though I caught the scent of grave dirt. I was ready to trade my share of the bin Laden mountain for a single puff from my inhaler.” (Omar)


I read this book looking for some semblance of humanity in Bin Laden, the man who orchestrated the murder of 2,976 people in New York and many more elsewhere under the pretence of protecting his home and allies from foreign influence and spreading his religion with missionary zeal, aims which are not too dissimilar from warmongering fundamentalists in the USA, Israel and other countries that the UK regards as allies rather than terrorists.

However, in Growing Up Bin Laden I failed to find a modern-day Saladin defending Islam from modern day Crusaders, but a sociopath who used his money, family connections, influence and war-hero status to bend people to his own warped worldview.

Najwa Bin Laden, the first of Osama’s five wives [arguably six if you count one “unconsummated” annulment], introduces her cousin Osama as a quiet, surly and serious teenager. Her love for him is palpable throughout the book and she refuses to criticise him directly, but her insights and those of her favourite son Omar, who is less reserved with his criticism, reveal the inner-rage that would turn Osama into a monster.

Critics of Islam should note that in this book Osama’s rage against the world doesn’t appear rooted in his fanatical religious devotion, although this undoubtedly plays a part, but in a complex psychology and dysfunctional family background similar to many other run-of-the-mill sociopaths. Osama comes across as an unappreciated war hero and bitter exile, harbouring resentment of being both an unloved middle-child and product of an abandoned single-mother*. If he grew up in America he would be Rambo [the original “don’t push me or I’ll give you a war” psycho in First Blood rather than the anaemic hero of the sequels], but equally if he grew up in Kilmarnock he’d be skinning up joints in The Scheme before signing up to the army to shoot “rag-heads”


*Osama is 18th son of 22 sons and 23 daughters born to Mohammed Bin Laden, and the only child from Mohammed’s short lived marriage to Allia Ghanem. Following his role in Afghanistan’s expulsion of Russia in the 1980s Osama was welcomed back to Saudi Arabia as a war hero, but soon exiled to Sudan for his objection to the USA’s protection of the kingdom in the first Gulf War, and later back to Afghanistan when he was subsequently kicked out by the Sudanese.

Rose, A Senseless Squalid War

Norman Rose
‘A Senseless, Squalid War’ : Voices From Palestine 1945-1948
2009


IT has often been remarked by my friends and colleagues that my bookshelf resembles a reading list from a dire Middle East studies course. Most react with horror when I tell them that I read these books for leisure as much as education. It’s difficult to pinpoint where my fascination with the Middle East began but perhaps, like Robert Fisk, it lies in a need to understand and atone for the sins of the father.

In his opus The Great War For Civilisation: The Conquest Of The Middle East [which I have shamefully yet to finish], Fisk recounts how his father Bill Fisk was duped, along with millions of other young men, into believing that the war he was fighting in 1914-18 was: “The Great War For Civilisation”. Nearly a century later, Robert Fisk is still reporting on “The Clash of Civilisations” between Christianity, Judaism and Islam in the Middle East, an area carved up in the spoils of what Fisk calls “my father’s war”.

My own atonement isn’t for the sins of my father, but for my grandfather Pte Richard McLaughlin, a sentryman in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers who fought in the last days of the British mandate in Palestine. Palestine 1945-1948 was “my grandfather’s war” [although it must be noted that this war was no more my grandfather’s than World War I was Bill Fisk’s. Both were conscripts.]

My grandfather died when I was very young, but when I was old enough to ask the ubiquitous question, “What did grandad do in the war?”, I recall being disappointed to hear that he was too young to fight in World War II but had completed his National Service in a mysterious land called Palestine.

He didn’t talk about it much, according to my father, save for a short, enigmatic, recollection of “dodging stones thrown from both sides of the road – with Arabs on the one side and Jews on the other”.

“Why would anyone fight in a war where neither side wanted you to be there?” I recall my child’s mind struggling to comprehend.

As I write, an adult still working to understand this “Clash of Civilisations” from my own little corner of the world, a diplomatic row is unfolding over Israel’s attack on an aid flotilla attempting to break their blockade on Gaza, an attack which left at least nine dead and dozens more injured. While reporting on fears for the wellbeing of Edinburgh-based Gaza aid worker Theresa McDermott today, I was struck by the parallels between this unfolding drama and the book I had already begun preparing for review on my blog’s ongoing list of personal reading.

For this reason, I have cast aside my usual thrifty editing to record my thoughts more deeply.

Norman Rose’s ‘A Senseless, Squalid War’ is the first book I’ve read that’s come close to clarifying my childish confusion about “my grandfather’s war.
The clearest statement I have yet found which comes close to articulating my childhood quandary can be found in chapter two of Rose’s relatively accessible history, from the first military and later civilian Governor of Jerusalem Ronald Storrs [the man T.E. Lawrence described in Seven Pillars as “the most brilliant Englishman in the Near East”].

“I am not wholly for either, but for both,” said Storrs in 1920. “Two hours of Arab grievances drive me to Synagogue, while after an intensive course of Zionist propaganda I am prepared to embrace Islam.”

Listening to the conflicting reports of today’s attack on the Gaza flotilla I find myself in the same position as Storrs. Today’s protestors were undoubtedly sailing in international waters, attempting to run a blockade which is legally questionable at best, while carrying aid to an area which resembles the Nazi ghettos that Israel’s founders used as moral justification for a Jewish homeland. This moral justification was articulated by sympathetic Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton: “There was a strong case for [a Jewish national home] before the war. There is an irresistible case now, after the unspeakable atrocities of [the Nazis].”

After listening to Israel’s defence today that their forces opened fire only after they were “clubbed, beaten and stabbed” [supported by television footage which seems to show supposedly “peaceful” protestors attacking Israel’s boarding party], and state their belief that the flotilla was, at least partly, organised by groups with “ties to Global Jihad, Al-Qaeda and Hamas” [something I have no evidence for but I don’t find entirely implausible that some Jihadi sympathisers were aboard] and I find myself back in the middle.

However, what Storrs was yet to witness was Israel’s disproportionate response to any provocation.

When British authorities carried out arms-raids on Jewish settlements during Operation Agatha in 1946, and the Zionists responded by blowing up British command HQ at the King David Hotel. When Egypt instigated a blockade on Israel in 1967 similar to the blockade that Israel now imposes on Gaza [with, it must be noted, the help of modern-day Egypt’s policing of Rafah], Israel launched a pre-emptive strike which annexed most of the region in six days. When Israel-friendly Lebanese president Bachir Gemayel was assassinated in 1982, the Israeli Defence Force [under orders from defence minister and future president Ariel Sharon] orchestrated a brutal massacre of hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians. When Lebanese militants again enraged Israel in 2006 by killing a dozen soldiers, Israel responded with a devastating bombing raid killing at least 1,500 people.

Once again we see the disproportionate response in action. When protestors attacked with sticks, stones and knives they were dropped by automatic weapons.

Further parallel’s between today’s events and those recounted by Rose in 1945-48 can be found in one of the most decisive events in turning public opinion against Britain’s continuing mandate in Palestine, the bid to prevent the SS Exodus boat breaking a British blockade imposed to prevent uncontrolled post-war immigration into Palestine.

According to Rose, American journalist Izzy Stone “accused the British of murder and piracy on the high seas , pointing out that the Exodus had been attacked in international waters” [a charge levelled at Israel today] and includes an account by Captain Stanley Brian de Courcy-Ireland, commander of British blockade flagship Ajax, which is absolutely dripping with contemporary resonances:

“The [British] boarding parties soon learned what they were up against. Those that got over were assaulted from all angles...I was forced to draw my revolver and fired eleven warning shots. One of the last shots, however, I used to stop a lad of 17 or 18 from collecting my scalp with a meat axe. He got it in the stomach.”

Israel has already faced a wave of global condemnation for the deaths on the flotilla today, but the repercussions for this are yet to be seen. Britain may have been Israel’s midwife but its international influence is now too small for Israel to bother taking notice. It remains to be seen how USA, the nation that nurtured Israel through its troublesome adolescence first by turning a blind eye to illegal arms smuggling during the mandate and then becoming its chief arms supplier, responds in the long term.

The US remains in thrall to the Jewish lobby and one of the most entertaining episodes that shows this lobby at work in the last days of the mandate recounted in Rose involved future mayor of Jerusalem Teddy Kollek, Mafia boss Frank Costello’s New York nightclub the Copacabana and “Zionist sympathiser” Frank Sinatra taking centre stage in illegal arms smuggling, using tactics not too dissimilar to those allegedly used by Palestinian supporters in Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran today.

“Kollek recorded liaisons with spies, mobsters, movie moguls, statesmen bankers, professors, industrialists and newspapermen. The Hagana [the principle Jewish military organisation in mandated Palestine] arms mission profited greatly from the vast amounts of army surplus supplies left over from the war [including] rifles, machine guns, engine parts and aircraft...

“To finance their vast operation Kollek relied on donations from wealthy Jewish backers as well as from the Jewish agency...

“Transferring money – or bribes – to Kollek’s shady contacts was always a problem...It was common knowledge that Frank Sinatra was sympathetic to the Zionist cause. Only the previous autumn he had sung at a rally at the Hollywood Bowl attended by 20,000 Zionist supporters. The solution was logical. Kollek: “I walked out of the front door of the building with a satchel and the Feds followed me. Out of the back door went Sinatra, carrying a paper bag filled with cash.”

“Perhaps for the only time in his career, Sinatra had played an unscripted role, that of ‘bagman’ for the Haganah.”

Majd, The Ayatollah Begs To Differ

Hooman Majd
The Ayatollah Begs to Differ
2008

Majd, an English/US educated Iranian who moved to the US permanently after the Islamic Revolution, clearly still has a lot of love and affinity with his home country, and judging by this book the feeling is mutual.

He is the grandson of a revered Ayatollah and describes himself as both 100 per cent Iranian and 100 per cent American, making his book a decent window into the often imperceptible world of Iranian politics, religion and culture.

Majd skips from trendy cannabis-fuelled student parties to clapped out opium dens, and this striking contrast alone is enough to cast a thousand Iranian preconceptions assunder. Some westerners view Islamic Iran as abstinent and austere, but many of the youths Majd encounters live in thrall of American culture, taking "cool Western drugs" in contrast to the opium of the grandfathers. They watch scantily clad Iranians gyrate in music videos in defiance of the Revolution's strict dress codes.

The fact that many of the videos are made in the States may indicate a Western intent to ferment anti-revolutionary fervour amongst the youths, but in reality the Revolution doesn't appear to intrude into their private lives at all. Provided they keep their misdemenours behind closed doors, The Ayatollah, it seems, doesn't ask questions.

The nation's opium addicted old men, meanwhile, seem too spaced out to care.

One of Iran's most interesting cultural foibles, which dominates Iranian society and therefore runs throughout the entire book, is the practice of "ta'arouf", an almost manic politeness that makes even a simple taxi-ride a battle of self-deprication - ranging from "I am your devoted servant" to "Piss, and I'll dive in". In the end Majd practically has to force the money into the driver's hand.

Ahmadinejad is apparently an expert at "ta'arouf", managing to be both self-depricating and acerbically withering in a single sentence.

But it is the similarities between East and West the Majd exposes most colourfully, particularly the American God-fearing Right's pathological fear of fundamentalist Islam: "It strikes me often when I am in Iran that were Christian evangelicals to take a tour of Iran today, they might find it the model for an ideal society they seek in America.

"Replace Allah with God, Muhammad with Jesus, keep the same public and private notions of chastity, sin, salvation and God's will, and a Christian republic is born."

Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

T.E. Lawrence
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
1926 (Vintage edition with introduction by Robert Fisk 2007)

The ur-text of Middle Eastern war reporting and top of the reading list for US Army officers during the last war in Iraq.

At the beginning of Lawrence of Arabia, the celebrated 1962 biopic very loosely based on Seven Pillars, a young reporter approaches Allenby [former commander in chief of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force and Lawrence’s paymaster] for a few words at Lawrence’s memorial service. “More words?” Allenby retorts, disdainfully.

After battling through nearly 700 pages of Lawrence’s dense and flowery recollection of his role in the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks in World War I, I can quite understand the sentiment – but what words!

My 2007 Vintage edition of Seven Pillars displays a neat endorsement by Winston Churchill on the back cover, calling it one of “the greatest books ever written in the English language”. He added: “As a narrative of war and adventure it is unsurpassable.”

As a narrative of adventure, the landscapes, characters and language Lawrence brought home from the Middle East are even more fantastic and otherworldly than anything Tolkein would later dream up for Middle Earth, and as a narrative of war it is still largely unrivalled.

This edition comes complete with a brisk and rather unsatisfying introduction by Robert Fisk, and the my final few pages dovetailed nicely with the BBC’s two-part documentary The Legacy of Lawrence of Arabia, narrated by former Iraq provincial governor [and current Tory parliamentary candidate] Rory Stewart. Both draw parallels with the Arab Revolt and the insurgency in Iraq, and highlight the continuing importance of the lessons Lawrence brought home from his war in the desert almost a century ago.

Penn Warren, All The Kings Men

Robert Penn Warren
All The King's Men
1946

A beautifully constructed Pulitzer Prize winning portrait of American politics and corruption. Governer Willie Stark is almost a premonition of Nixon a full 20 years before he rose to power and a quarter decade before his fall (partly through the work of this book's near namesake).

Every page is poetry, every character fully described. Penn Warren's language brings the book's American South setting alive, and allows Willie Stark to seduce you though his actions are so abhorrant, and in this way Penn Warren created a wholly believable politician.

Favourite Stark quote, "There's something on everybody. Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud."

I wonder if Nixon had this in mind when he sent out his "ratfuckers".

Maupassant, Bel Ami

Guy de Maupassant
Bel Ami
1885

I re-read this after hearing a pretty ropey adaptation on Radio 4 at the weekend. Maupassant's tale of the rise-and-rise of a Parisian journalist who gossips his way into high society is a rare book, if only for the fact that the villain wins out in the end.

However, perhaps the fact that the central villain George Duroy rises through a society of villains contains a deeper message on the corrupt nature of power.
Maupassant's reluctance to knock down his womanising, conniving journalist in the end perhaps stems from his own tortured life. The blurb at the back of my Penguin Classics edition states that at the time of writing Maupassant was "already under a sentence of death from syphilis". Perhaps he found a life of social and sexual debauchery that does not come with any consequences - and indeed positively leads to advancement - very appealing.

There is also a contemporary lesson in Duroy's means of financial advancement, when he cottons on to his editor's plan to manipulate the financial markets by whipping up the fervour for a war in Morocco.

Look how well some companies did when a gang of unscrupulous oil barons connived their way into power and, with the help of some acquiescent media editors, whipped up the fervour for war in another Islamic country recently.

Coll, The Bin Ladens

Steve Coll
The Bin Ladins: An Arabian Family in the American Century
2008

With a title like that you would expect the family's cave dwelling, Yank-baiting uber-terrorist to be the star of the show, but Osama is largely eclipsed by his lesser known but equally larger than life elders and siblings.

By far the most enthralling book I've read this year. The level of research is frightening and Coll's style is informal and entertaining, although one would expect nothing less from the former Washington Post and New Yorker staffer.

Each new character is introduced like friends at a party, and some of the Bin Laden's did love to party.

If anyone could be said to stand out from patriarch Mohammed bin Laden's 50 children it would be his eldest son and heir to the Bin Laden empire Salem. Salem is portrayed as charming, funny and worldly. He was the life and soul of the party, with a limited but frequently belted-out repertoir of Western party tunes.

Osama was Mohammed's seventh son and the only child by his tenth wife. His destructive world-view is largely presented through the prism of his fast-deteriorating relationship with the Bin Laden family, which had already been severed before 9/11. The Bin Ladens themselves remain perpetually in thrall of, and desperate to stay close to, Saudi Arabia's ruling Saudi kings.

Also revealed is the family's complex relationship with aeroplanes (Mohammed and Salem both died in one, Osama killed thousands with two), and there is a bizarre cameo appearance by everyone's favourite Scot Sean Connery.