Loving Osama

Via Right Thinking Girl, I ran across a bizarre article by a columnist named David Cobain.

It’s called, “Osama Bin Laden…a guy I met in a bar,” but it might as well have been called “Osama Bin Laden: A love story,” because the guy literally comes across as smitten with Bin Laden. Here’s a sample:

“But I do know (Osama Bin Laden) to be a man, a remarkable man, not a spectral menace. And, while I know nothing of his capacity for friendship, I can well understand that his admirers are legion.

This is not limp-wristed liberalism, compounded of silliness, simple-mindedness and sentimentality. It is what remains to me of the impression Bin Laden made when I met him, one evening in 1982, at a hotel in Abu Dhabi, up the coast from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

I was drunk.

…I remained at the table, occasionally ordering another beer until my attention was drawn to a figure seated at the other side of the lounge, a young Arab man dressed in a long white robe.

As exceptionally tall as he was and as strikingly good looking, it was not these characteristics that attracted my gaze. Rather, it was his still, silent intensity. He sat, impervious to the hubbub of drink and talk, gazing unblinkingly at everything and, it seemed, at nothing.

It was impossible for me, I found, to take my eyes off him. He had the extraordinary quality of attracting and holding one’s attention inactively, by his presence, by the impression he gave of focused other-worldliness. He brought to mind, God help me, an image of the Risen Christ.

I sat there for an age, my gaze immovable, knowing that he saw me, even though his eyes didn’t move, didn’t meet mine, didn’t alight on my face. Then, still without moving head or eyes, he gestured to me. He patted the empty place to his right on the wall bench where he sat.

Leaving my beer unfinished, I rose from the table and felt myself impelled across the room to sit where this extraordinary individual had indicated. There, at his side, I took my seat and we talked. We talked about…things that, in truth, I cannot even faintly recollect.

…Drunk as I was, and as affected by the power of this individual, I have no idea what passed between us, how long I sat there, when my companion left….

…That might be so: I cannot know, with all the theories, counter-theories and conspiracy theories swirling around him. But I do know, from what I recall, that he is both human and almost super-human, an individual of more power and presence than any other mortal I’ve encountered.”

Is it just me or does this guy come across like a 15 year old girl with a crush on the captain of the football team? I mean if Bin Laden himself read this article, he’d probably be like, “Good grief, infidel. I don’t normally mind the favorable press you Westerners give Al-Qaeda. You know, playing up every mistake of the Great Satan’s armies, while treating our ragtag group of disturbed mental patients as invincible and shrugging your shoulders while we cut off your heads and blow ourselves up in crowds of women and children. But, I reminded you of the, “Risen Christ?” You’re laying it on a little thick there, don’t you think?”

Long story short, this is a creepy column…

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