Posted on 07/11/2004 1:10:02 PM PDT by NavySEAL F-16
Geneva - Osama bin Laden's sister-in-law describes him as a man so driven by his beliefs that he would deny a water bottle to his own infant son in the heat of the Saudi desert.
"I'm sure Osama would not have wanted to lose his baby" by his insistence his wife use a spoon instead of a bottle, says Carmen Binladin, the Swiss sister-in-law of the alleged terrorist mastermind.
"It was not as if he didn't care about the child. But to him, the baby's suffering was less important than a principle which he probably imagined stemmed from some seventh-century verse in the Quran."
But Binladin said the respect her husband and Osama's 23 other brothers accorded him by accepting his decisions made her realise she would have to leave Saudi Arabia with her daughters. And it was part of what convinced her that the brothers haven't stopped supporting Osama despite their disavowals of him.
"My understanding of that culture and from what I have seen and what I have read, I cannot believe that they have cut off Osama completely," Binladin told The Associated Press on the eve of a visit to the United States to promote her book, Inside the Kingdom, to be published next Wednesday.
She said some of Osama's sons are still in Saudi Arabia, working for the bin Laden Group construction company the 25 brothers inherited from their father, Mohammed bin Laden. She added that she believed some of Osama's sisters also still side with him.
"It's certainly possible that Osama retains ties to the royal family, too," she said. "The bin Ladens and the princes work together, very closely. They are secretive and they are united. They have been inextricably linked for many decades through close friendships and business ventures."
Saudi leaders have repeatedly condemned Osama bin Laden, however, and cancelled his Saudi citizenship.
September 11 'was plotted'
Carmen Binladin, who married Osama's brother Yeslam in 1974 and lived in Saudi Arabia for nine years, said she wrote the book to explain to her daughters why she returned with them to Switzerland and was engaged in a lengthy divorce - still unresolved after 14 years. Her husband, an investor and also a Swiss citizen, still lives in Geneva, but she says he tries to have no contact with their daughters.
Binladin was in Switzerland when she learned of the hijacked planes crashing into the World Trade Centre.
"Something in me snapped," she said. "This was no freak accident. This had to be a deliberately plotted attack, on a country I had always loved and looked on as my second home.
"As the hours passed, my worst fear came true," Binladin said. "One man's face and name was on every news bulletin: Osama bin Laden. ... I felt a sick sense of doom. This day would change all of our lives, forever."
Binladin gives a rare glimpse of life inside Saudi Arabia _ and in the bin Laden family, which lived in the 1970s in a group of houses on the outskirts of Jeddah. Women had to wear a robe covering their faces and bodies whenever they went outside the home or encountered males outside the immediate family.
"One day, Yeslam's younger brother Osama came to visit," she said.
She said she doubted accounts that Osama had been a playboy as a teenager in Beirut. "I never heard such tales about Osama," she said. "As far as I know, Osama was always devout. His family revered him for his piety."
Edited by Tisha Steyn
How do you know that he is not now in Saudi Arabia? It would certainly be safer in Saudi---and more comfortable, too.
A Democrat with a diaper on his head and a beaver tail on his face.
You are right. I think I must have hiccoughed when I typed that.
.........and that he had a favorite blue blanket as a child that he nick-named 'Blankey' that became threadbare from constant washing over the years for which he cried inconsolably for days when it finally fell apart.
The poor little dear.
Um, the article doesn't do anything of the sort.
It seems this woman is saying that she's not surprised that 9/11 was Osama's doing, that he'd rather let his child die than violate some stupid interpretation of a Quranic verse and that he didn't embrace fundamentalism because he failed with Western women, but because he was devout from nearly jump.
Not sure about you, but that makes him even worse. It always seemed a bit silly to attribute his fanaticism to his failure to bed Western women or shyness. Instead, maybe he simply believes as he believes and that's why he's Osama.
Nothing touchy-feely about that.
"........the baby's suffering was less important than a principle........."
A man of 'principle'. How nice.
I rest my case.
DocMike
So what? Isn't Bin Laden a man of principle? Who said the principle was good?
Hitler believed in what he was doing, but his followers even moreso. Communists were often "of principle" even if that principle was "the Revolution above all" or "the 'Workers'."
Doesn't make them less evil and doesn't make the story "touchy-feely."
I really don't care about 'brothers', 'sisters' or 'family'. In fact, I really don't care to hear anything at all that lends an air of normality or even tangentially humanizes him.
All I want is to hear he's dead.
OPINION: UBL IS DEAD, or captured or in a hidey hole. His evil spirit lives on in the bodies and minds of today's jihadis.
Bin Laden is one of 51 children (counting the females, which is something Muslims don't usually deign to do). Remember that his father had four wives at a time.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
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