Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health by Dave Jaffe - Part Eight

  The Terrorist Who Wrote Poetry.


    On September 11, 2001, four airplanes were hijacked by some fanatical Moslems. Two of the airplanes were flown into the World Trade Twin Towers in New York City. Another was flown into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. A fourth crashed before it could hit its target, which may have been the U.S. Capital or the White House.
     Close to 3,000 people, mostly Americans died from the actions of the hijackers. Most of the hijackers were members of a terrorist group called Al-Qaeda. Their leader Osama Bin Laden had founded the group a few years before.
      In 1998, Al-Qaeda militants bombed two U.S. embassies in East Africa killing 12 Americans and two hundred Africans. This act was the first known terrorist action of Al-Qaeda. A story put out by a Moslem magazine and based in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, mourned the death of the Al-Qaeda militants who died in the attack.
      "God would re-unite us with them in paradise," the article said.
      The leader of Al-Qaeda was a poet or at least a part-time one called Osama  Bin Laden.
Born in 1957, bin Laden came from a multimillionaire Saudi Arabian family. He helped set up an anti-Soviet Union fighting force in the early 1980's when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. He probably got help from the Saudi government and the CIA in doing this.
    Like many upper class Moslems especially Saudi ones, he wrote poetry in Arabic. This tradition of writing poetry was born in Arabia in the 7th century. It came hand-in-hand with the rise of Islam.
     Most rulers and political activists don't write poetry. Many politicians in democracies write books that are written in part by ghost writers. Some politicians like the late French president Georges Pompidou know quite a bit of literature. Pompidou knew lots of French poetry and often quoted French poetry in cabinet meetings.Xi Jinping, the present head of China claims to have read lots of Russian and French literature.Yet Xi Jinping doesn't write poetry. Nor do most present day political activists. Osama Bin Laden did.
      In  any case the '9/11' acts as the day came to be known set off what is now called 'The War On Terror'. "He who isn't with us," U.S. president George W. Bush said in effect, "is against us." U.S. and other NATO troops invaded Afghanistan looking for Osama bin Laden.
Then in 2003 more U.S. troops and other NATO forces invaded Iraq and overthrew its leader Saddam Hussein.
    These invasions were then followed by what came to be called 'Arab Spring'. In 2010 and later, people in the Middle East rebelled mostly unsuccessfully against their tyrannical rulers. The two events seemed to merge into each other and many people died.
     "We are all Americans now," headlined the sometimes anti-American French paper 'Le Monde' on the day after '9/11'. Soon this came true. After 2003, terrorists and suicide bombers who were fanatical Moslems, shot and killed people and blew themselves up all over the world. Countries like Canada, France, Great Britain, Spain and the U.S. again, and many places across the Middle East and East Asia were targetted by Moslem terrorists.
     Meanwhile NATO and other troops killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq and thousands of people in Afghanistan. They in turn died by the thousands. NATO countries like the U.S.A. and Canada helped overthrow Moammar Ghadaffi in Libya. Soon Libya descended into chaos like Iraq and then Syria.
      In Syria it seems clear that the U.S. and the Saudis are trying to overthrow the ruling Assad family while Iran is helping the Assad group. And all across the Middle East and parts of Asia, Iran's rulers back Sh'ia Moslems while the Saudis and the U.S. government back Sunni Moslems.
    All these conflicts created millions of refugees and over a million dead. In Iraq alone over a million people died after the NATO 2003 invasion. In Syria over  a quarter of a million people are now dead. Meanwhile in Syria and Iraq a new fanatical group has emerged called ISIS. The War On Terror and terrorists alone has killed over 75,000 people in Pakistan.
     Perhaps all this chaos and killing was intended by Osama bin Laden. If so, he succeeded.Yet he didn't live to see it all.
     U.S. SEAL forces killed him in Pakistan where he was hiding in 2011.
    "The battle camels are ready to go/" he wrote in a poem celebrating a suicide bombing attack on an American destroyer that killed 17 U.S. soldiers. "To her doom/ (The battleship) progresses slowly, clothed in a huge illusion."
     Bin Laden was another poet that ended up as a mass murderer. If he'd only written poetry he may have been quickly forgotten. But as the architect of '9/11'   he has won an unfortunate place in the history books.