WHO IS OSAMA?

One of the oddities of the saturation coverage of the last few weeks has been a remarkable lack of real data on what kind of person Osama bin Laden actually is. He has become a cipher rather than a human being. I want to know more about his family, how he was brought up, how he came to be such a borderline personality, what’s with his silly outfits, and so on. I’ve seen almost no pictures of him as a child, yet he called his mommy to warn her of his upcoming massacre. (Which reminds me: why hasn’t she been arrested for advance knowledge of a mass murder without warning the authorities and the world? Wasn’t she in Paris at the time? Can we extradite her?) The only recent piece I found interesting was a humor column by Giles Coren, where he likens Osama to upper-class British ne’er-do-wells who compensate for their massive privilege by smoking pot and going left-wing at college. In Britain they’re known as trust-fund Rastafarians, or “trustafarians.” I remember at Oxford how revolting I thought these people were. Isn’t this a good propaganda point in our campaign to win over world opinion – that this man is wealthy and privileged beyond most people’s imaginings and is about as authentic a man of the downtrodden masses as Donald Trump? But my main point is that we need to understand Osama, stripped of his murderous pieties. We’ve been subjected to endless pointless profiles of dumb-ass movie actors for years. Can’t we drum up one to bring bin Laden down to earth?

STEM CELLS WITHOUT BABIES?: A head-spinning piece in today’s New York Times about the possibility of chemically “tricking” a human egg into believing it has been fertilized, in order to create stem-cells in embryos that could not become developed human life. I’m not sure I understand the full science of this, but it’s certainly intriguing. It’s definitely another reason to be circumspect toward the argument that traditional stem-cell research, which inevitably involves the destruction of potential human life, is the only way to go. The term for this still-experimental process is “parthenogenesis,” based on the Greek for virgin birth. The article, alas, is a little confusing because it both says that these embryos cannot become new life, and yet later argues that in the future, difficulties might be overcome to pioneer whole new avenues of human reproduction through parthenogenesis. Go figure. Some feminists might be intrigued to find that, “Stem cells derived from male parthenotes tend to turn into muscle cells, while stem cells from female parthenotes turned more often into brain and nerve cells.” Brawn and brains again.

LETTERS: Grover Norquist blows a gasket.

CHOMSKY LIES AGAIN: A devastating take-down of Noam Chomsky’s latest anti-American screed can be found on the highly useful website, Spinsanity. Chomsky’s use of the term “silent genocide” to refer to the allies’ war methods is typically depraved.

CONTRA HOWARD: Last week, I pixeled my own dissection of Michael Howard’s (I don’t respect peerage and refuse to call people Sir Anything) view that the U.S. should never have declared a “war” against al Qaeda and the Taliban. Here are two very cogent responses as well – from the estimable Robert Harris and my friend Anne McElvoy, a beleaguered woman of sense at the Independent in London. I particularly enjoyed Anne’s description of Howard’s “pre-emptive, multi-purpose defeatism.” Here’s an extract: “The historian Michael Howard argues that we are in a no-win situation towards Mr. Bin Laden, who would have either a platform for global propaganda if he is brought to justice, or be a martyr if killed. I cannot share this pre-emptive, multi-purpose defeatism. A martyred bin Laden or a bin Laden incanting his message from the dock somewhere is infinitely preferable to a Mr. bin Laden still in charge of an organisation training suicide bombers to fly into tall buildings.”