Omar bin Laden is the son of one of the most notorious monsters of the modern age, but until recently he was making a peaceful living in the Orne region of Normandy painting landscapes – a far cry from the atrocities perpetrated by his father on Sept 11 2001.
However, the 43-year-old has now been banned from returning to France by the nation’s new Interior Minister, Bruno Retailleau, who accused him of writing social media posts “glorifying terrorism”.
“There are only three choices in Islam: either willing submission; or payment of the jizya, thereby physical, though not spiritual, submission to the authority of Islam; or the sword—for it is not right to let him [an infidel] live.” — Osama bin Laden, “Al-Qaeda’s Declaration in Response to the Saudi Ulema.”
New translations of Osama bin Laden’s personal documents show that the intention behind 9/11 was not only to kill Americans, but to incite U.S. protests, like those seen during the Vietnam War.
These documents, first recovered in the 2011 raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, have been declassified since 2017, but were unorganized and mostly untranslated, until now. The letters offer one of the closest looks yet into the mind of America’s most infamous terrorist.
Osama bin Laden banned al Qaeda from assassinating Joe Biden because the Democrat would make an incompetent president and ‘lead the US into a crisis’.
Bin Laden made the remark in a 2010 letter that was found in a trove of documents at the Pakistan compound where he was killed by US special forces in 2011.
The document was first made public in 2012 but has been brought back to light and given new significance amid the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan that has gifted the country back to the Taliban.
“Bin Laden? Why are you reading that?” asked the proprietor of an Israeli bodega just off the Tel Aviv beach. I was buying a bottle of water, but the shop was full of multicolored flags, thongs, and glitter. The pride parade had just ended. The man took my money, looked at me, and then my book again. He shrugged.
I left the shop chuckling. If only Osama bin Laden knew. He was obsessed with the destruction of both Israel and the United States. Israel was certainly getting the last laugh. And America, after assassinating him on May 2, 2011, in Abbottabad, Pakistan, seemed to have gotten the last word.
“I don’t understand why people take only one wife,” Osama bin Laden would often say, in what was the nearest he ever came to a lighthearted quip. “If you take four wives, you live like a groom.”
But Osama disapproved of how his own father, the wealthy Yemeni builder Mohammed bin Laden, went about the Islamic sanctioned practice of polygamy that allows a man to legally take up to four wives.
