Father, Son and Holy War
My apologies to Anand Patwardhan, but I can’t resist the temptation to borrow the title of his film as an apt description of what is happening in the world right now (i.e. October 2001, the month after the terrorist attacks in the USA). Whether the father is Saudi billionnaire Mohammed bin Laden, with his close ties to the Saudi royal family, the son is his estranged offspring Osama, who is enraged every time he thinks of infidel American troops stationed on the holy soil of Saudi Arabia, and the holy war is the jihad which the latter has declared against America and Americans; or the father is George Bush Sr, who started it all with his war to defeat Saddam Hussein by gradually exterminating the people of Iraq, the son is George Jr., who has trouble opening his mouth without putting his foot in it, and the holy war is the crusade the latter has declared against, well, let us say vaguely specified enemies who happen to be Muslims – in both cases, the themes of religious communalism, militarism and machismo are inextricably intertwined.
There is even an uncanny similarity in the ways that the two sons think, if we ignore the cowboy rhetoric of one (‘wanted - dead or alive’, ‘smoke 'em outa their holes’, etc.) and the pious expressions of the other (‘may God mete them the punishment they deserve’, etc.). Bush tells us, ‘either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’ (statement of 20/9/01); Osama tells us the entire world is divided into ‘two regions – one of faith… and another of infidelity’ (statement of 7/10/01). In other words, they both want us to believe that the population of the world is divided into two camps, one headed by Bush, the other by bin Laden.