Bin Laden Told His Children: Live in Peace in the West

An interview with Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law, Zakaria al-Sadah, published in London’s Sunday Times (subscription only), reveals that the world’s most prominent terrorist (until shot to death by US special operations troops in a raid on his Pakistani compound) told his children that they should “not follow him down the road to jihad”, but instead should “go to Europe and America and get a good education”.  Al-Sadah, brother to bin Laden’s youngest wife, said that Osama told his children that “you have to study, live in peace and don’t do what I am doing or what I have done.”

This adds to the sentiment expressed last May in what a Kuwaiti newspaper published as bin Laden’s will.

In it, bin Laden apologized to his children for his absence in their lives, “You, my children, I apologize for giving you so little of my time because I responded to the need for jihad,” he wrote.

He also instructed his offspring not to join al-Qaeda and used precedents from Islamic texts as justification for forbidding his children to engage in “holy warfare.”

Besides the stunning hypocrisy, I find it interesting that up to the moment of this posting, I can find reference to the story in foreign (mostly British newspapers) and even Al-Arabiya, but very little play in US news outlets, other than Yahoo and Fox News.