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| Terror Networks |
| A Western woman’s journey inside the Bin Laden ’village’ |
| 2003-11-07 |
| From The International Herald Tribune - EFL & Fair Use Robert Kroon/IHT In the late 1970’s, Osama bin Laden went to visit his brother Yeslam, who lived in the sprawling family settlement near Jidda. Answering the doorbell, Carmen Binladin, Yeslam’s Swiss-born wife, stood face to face with her brother-in-law and invited him in. But Osama bin Laden froze, grumbled something in Arabic, and turned his head away. "I was unveiled and he couldn’t bear looking at my naked face," recalled Carmen, who is back in Switzerland and involved in a tortuous divorce battle with her Saudi husband, who also lives in Geneva. "My brother-in-law never deigned to speak a word with me," she added. In a revealing biography, "Inside the Opaque Kingdom," Carmen Binladin chronicles her nine years of married life in a puritanical, male-dominated community, "where women are no more than house pets." The book is a diary-style account of her struggle to cope with rules and strictures as suffocating as the desert climate. The English edition will be published by the end of the year by Virago in London. The couple has three daughters but no son, much to her husband’s disappointment. Binladin, who says that was not an issue in the divorce, returned to Geneva in 1987 "because I could no longer take it and I didn’t want my children to grow up in a prison." The couple has been separated for more than 10 years, and the divorce battle is dragging on, for reasons she will not discuss. An elegant woman in her late 40’s, she says she wrote the book as a "document for my three beloved daughters, not for my own notoriety or glory. After all, they have to live with that name, and after 9/11 that has been sheer hell." ...More... An insider’s look for the terminally curious! The value lies in the ending of the story, folks. |
| Posted by:.com |
| #2 I feel sorry for the daughters since they didn't have a choice in the matter. The mother I just want to stare at and say 'DUH'. |
| Posted by: Charles 2003-11-7 9:35:40 AM |
| #1 I have absolutely no sympathy for this woman and her hell-spawn, and sympathy is what this article attempts to invoke with the reader. Tough break when you make crappy choices and have to live with them. It sucks to be her and her daughters. Life will go on with or without her. Islam will wind up on the ashheap of history as a dour and ultimately self-destructive religion. |
| Posted by: badanov 2003-11-7 7:01:35 AM |