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23 August 2006

"At night when you're asleep / Into your tent I'll creep / You'll rule this land with me / 'Cause I'm the Sheikh of Araby"

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The Australian (national daily / Murdoch)
Wednesday 23 August 2006


Osama
bin saving all his love
for Whitney


Geoff Elliott, Washington correspondent

SO that's all that was needed to catch Osama bin Laden -- a good old honey trap? No need for air raids over Tora Bora and bunker-buster bombs. Just call Whitney Houston.

In one of the more bizarre stories to emerge from the war on terror, Kola Boof, a self-advertised former sex slave of the al-Qa'ida leader, claims in her book, "Diary of a Lost Girl," that bin Laden was obsessed with the singer of I Will Always Love You.

In an excerpt to appear in the September issue of Harper's Bazaar magazine, Boof writes that bin Laden "told me Whitney was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen."

"He said that he had a paramount desire for her and although he claimed music was evil, he spoke of some day spending vast amounts of money to go to America and try to arrange a meeting," she writes.

Boof, born Naima Bint Harith, is a 37-year-old Sudanese poet and author who now lives in California. She has said previously that she was repeatedly raped and intimidated into cohabiting with bin Laden for six months in Morocco in 1996.

Her writings have led to a fatwa being issued against her. That hasn't stopped comedians having a shot at her, wondering if the fatwa has more to do with some of her other work, which included, until recently, a writing job on the US soap opera Days of our Lives.

But when it comes to bin Laden's obsession with Houston, Boof says she's not making it up.

"He said he wanted to give her a mansion he owned in a suburb of Khartoum [Sudan, confluence of Blue and White Nile].

"He would say how beautiful she is, what a nice smile she has, how truly Islamic she is but is just brainwashed by American culture and by her husband -- Bobby Brown, whom Osama talked about having killed."

All this prompted US comedian Jeffrey Ross to muse yesterday that bin Laden must have a slow internet connection and is still downloading images from the 1980s, noting Houston's steep fall from fame to a life of reported drug dependency.

- 30 -

The Sheikh of Araby (1921)
lyrics: Harry B. Smith and Francis Wheeler
music: Ted Snyder


I'm the Sheikh of Araby,
Your love belongs to me.
At night when you're asleep
Into your tent I'll creep.

The stars that shine above,
Will light our way to love.
You'll roam this land with me,
The Sheikh of Araby.

Oh, I'm the Sheikh of Araby
And all the women worship me.
You should see them follow me around. Not bad.

Even wives of all the other sheiks,
They beg to kiss my rosy cheeks
And that ain't bad -- in fact, that's good, I've found. I'm a cad!

When I lay down to sleep
I'm counting girls instead of sheep
From my harem I can't scare 'em out. Why should I?

They're beauties from all races,
And some have pretty faces.
I'm the Sheikh who knows what love is all about.

6 comments:

James J. Olson said...

Um, has he seen Whitney lately? She's not looking so glamorous.

Vleeptron Dude said...

Well, it's about time for Tony Snow or Rumsfeld or Cheney or one of those cats to float another self-serving story that they have credible intelligence that all the latest Osama audio and video messages are old and stale, and that Osama's really dead -- or at death's door from kidney failure and having trouble making it twice a week to the dialysis clinic in the Hindu Kush.

CNN and Fox love those stories, especially in summer when there's no real news. They're ALMOST as good as actually capturing or killing him.

And the congressional elections are coming up in November. Maybe "Osama is very very ill" would be 23% as good for Republican candidates as "Osama is dead" or "We have Osama in a cage."

But the Hopelessly In Love With Whitney thing would be consistent with the failing eyesight or blindness that goes with advanced renal failure. He's lucky he's not mooning over a fire hydrant.

I know what Love is, and if it's Really Love, once you fall in love with Molly Ringwald in "Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone" (she was 15), you never stop loving Molly Ringwald. If it's REALLY Love, you never stop.

My guess is, Osama had some hours to kill one day in Karachi in 1992 and wandered into a matinee of "The Bodyguard" at the Cinequad Multiplex, and just got Smote Bigtime. Those were her glory days, and a big studio production spends more on the star's hair, makeup and wardrobe than I spend to keep my truck on the road for five years.

If it's Really Love, there is no cure.

He might not have seen any or many recent Visual Updates. When I was on the run for a couple of years, it was impossible to get cable and I had to let my subscription to The National Enquirer run out. They might not be showing MTV's Bobby Brown reality show in most of the caves he's hiding in.

But even if he has the entire al-Qaida network bringing him all the latest supermarket tabloids and DVDs, he apparently blames all Whitney's troubles on Western Materialistic Capitalistic Satanic Society, so the more she lets herself go, the more he fantasizes about staging an epic guerrilla raid to Rescue Her from her Western oppressors. Safe in his cave, his Love will speedily cure her.

CIA's got to be getting pretty desperate by now and they'll try anything. Whitney's not very busy these days, so maybe they'll arrange a few personal appearances at the Kabul Mall, and watch for an old guy shoving his way into the front row for an autographed photo. If it's Really Love, he'll be there.

James J. Olson said...

Have you abandoned us? Or has the Zeta Beam gone on the fritz again?

muebles las rozas said...

It can't really have effect, I believe this way.

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