- There are fleeting moments when I think that the Taliban
might actually have a point when they say that Western women are amoral.
One came last week, when all around me other women started proclaiming
how much they fancied Osama bin Laden.
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- I heard: "He's got beautiful, brooding eyes",
"He's cool: when Bush was getting all worked up, Osama was just sipping
tea in his tent." One woman who was in Washington when the hijacked
plane struck the Pentagon, actually said that "he has a sort of animal
magnetism: you feel that here's a man who could protect you". Another
said: "He certainly wouldn't dither."
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- Please don't write to tell me that this is in bad taste.
I already know that, and so do they, because they often put in caveats
such as: "Although I utterly condemn what he has done," and,
"Of course, if he was in my flat I'd hand him straight over to the
police." But that's the point: inside their heads, Osama is already
inside their flat.
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- It isn't the shy student Osama of the Seventies, in his
trendy flares and skinny-rib sweater, to whom they are attracted; it is
the turbaned Osama of today, issuing edicts of mass destruction from his
impenetrable cave. Part of bin Laden's appeal, I think, is that he doesn't
seem quite real. He has never claimed responsibility for the US attacks,
or been filmed with Western heads of state. He appears only in his own
broadcasts from distant Afghanistan, looking like a quasi-mythological
cross between a villain from a James Bond film and a Rudolph Valentino
sheikh.
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- I don't find bin Laden in the least attractive, but even
I can see that his soulful appearance has been one of fate's little jokes.
Just as a truly gentle man can have the mug of an East End prize-fighter,
so bin Laden in repose has the dignified visage of a kindly, peaceable
man: the sort from whom one would not hesitate to seek directions after
a wrong turning in Kabul. For his bashful female admirers in the West,
however, his allure is tangled up in something much deeper and messier
than that.
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- Plenty of women (and men too) are viscerally attracted
both to men with good looks, and those with a strong whiff of cordite.
A combination of the two creates a powerful, if indefensible, magnetism.
Che Guevara would now be remembered chiefly for his enthusiastic use of
repression and his disastrous grasp of economics, were it not for that
famous black-and-white photograph of him in a black beret, staring moodily
out from his chiselled face.
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- Bin Laden is not Che Guevara, but he still looks pretty
sharp on a T-shirt. In fact, he looks a bit like Che in reverse: Guevara
had a black beret, a mesmeric stare and a pale face, and bin Laden has
a white turban, a mesmeric stare and a dark face. Quite apart from how
bin Laden looks, however, is the mere fact of what he is: a man with sufficient
power to cause enormous destruction, and continuing consternation, in the
West.
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- There is a craven streak in the female psyche, the unspeakable
bit that Sylvia Plath meant when she wrote that "every woman adores
a Fascist / the boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like
you". The brute doesn't even need to be handsome: look at how Hitler,
a strutting, greasy-haired creature, set silly Unity Mitford all a-quiver:
"Yesterday we had lunch with the Fuhrer," she wrote home in 1936,
"it was wonderful and he was simply heavenly."
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- The armchair biologists will no doubt tell us that it
is rooted in some atavistic female need to ally ourselves with the fiercest
and nastiest warrior in the tribe. But the admiration for bin Laden is
also tangled up, I think, in Stockholm syndrome: the curious phenomenon
whereby people who are taken hostage end up identifying with their kidnappers.
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- Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network have spread an amorphous
cloud of apprehension over the West. It hangs over the Western women who
fancy bin Laden as much as everyone else: for who knows what form a terrorist
attack could take, or where it might land? In their fantasies, however,
Osama is not their persecutor, but their protector: they are the one person
he will not allow to be hurt.
-
- Yeats once wrote that "in dreams begin responsibilities",
and I think I agree. If you allow yourself to fancy bin Laden, you've got
to take on board his penchant for mass murder. No, no, say the others,
that's precisely the wrong point. Fantasies are where one loses all responsibility.
That is why, as one nags one's husband into doing the washing up, one can
freely fantasise about a gun-toting gangster who would rather die than
put his hand into a Marigold.
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- I don't much go for terrorists or dictators: their chosen
cologne of other people's misery is too strong, and the closer that misery
comes to home the fouler it smells. And the truth is that such men are
usually too obsessed with their cause to have any time for women either.
Move on, Osamaniacs. It isn't you he's interested in.
- Link
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- Comment
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- By Alfred Lehmberg
Lehmberg@snowhill.com www.alienview.net
10-14-1
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- The irony is stupefying. thick as musky fog and its own
turgid inverse of ruinous illumination. And it's about sex, so it's _not_
funny. Sex never is.
-
- The viscerally adored Osama IS the stuff of the wettest
kind of dream, but it is a dream sharpened by a cruel deprivation of the
knowledge that a man should have for a woman, it uses that deprivation
as a tool of the most efficient manipulation, and it too casually renders
the BEST half of a sexual team to the level of a machine bred to produce
male children. Ossama's outlook on these ironically smitten women, and
women in general, remains egregiously and aggressively dire...
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- Won't they realize that WAR is (and has been) declared
by Ossama on the whole of womankind? Can't they feel that Womankind faces
their most serious enemy, EVER, in Ossama's psychopathic company? Don't
they see he is the greatest cultural threat to have surfaced against them
in their recorded history?
-
- How can they still be moved to moon and flutter at the
thought of him? Truly, his embrace is made of broken glass. His kiss is
a poisoned razor blade.
-
- Gone are the strides of western civilization if the women
he gains dominion over are thrust to a secondhand status. Gone is their
valued contribution. Gone is the appreciation of their individual sensibility.
Gone are their intelligence, their input, and an output they enhance with
their very presence. Gone is their fellowship, gone are their efficacious
associations, and gone, at the same time, is more than half of our reach
as a species.
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- Unless women are foolishly attracted to that which would
cause them the most harm (thoughtless subjugations, arbitrary beatings,
clitoral removals, battery acid in the face of the uncovered.) they must
see Ossama and his terrible ethics for what they are: A declaration of
total war on womankind by mankind, a retreat to the darkest of dark ages,
and the sure end of human advancement, spiritual growth, and sexual synergy.
Somehow - that all sounds something less than completely romantic to _me_.
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- Womankind! Be afraid. Be very afraid! Ossama's war is
against YOU!
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- Lehmberg@snowhill.com
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