Did Osama kill Obama?

The news that Qaddafi's son and three grandchildren were killed in a bomb raid in Tripoli was soon eclipsed by the announcement that Osama bin Laden had been found, killed in combat and quickly buried at sea, some seven hundred miles away, and thus not the most obvious choice of burial location unless you wanted to hide something. But these days, journalists don't ask difficult questions anymore, and the world media were full with world leaders grasping the opportunity to sound jubilant and reassert their unswerving loyalty to America and the so-called war on terror. That war, we are told, is not dead with Osama, but likely to be intensified. Al-Qaeda, by now having outdone even McDonald's as a true American brand name, lives on and the soap opera continues.

For a soap opera it is, and bin Laden, one of the main actors, had eventually to be written out of the script, since he no longer participated in any of the episodes and his occasional appearances by audio or video tape lacked the credibility of the real actor in the flesh. The war on terror needs its success stories, and tracking down, confronting and eradicating bin Laden fits the bill perfectly. It also puts to rest the pertinent questions about the whereabouts of the absent actor. Happy with the "mission accomplished" statement, there is no longer any need to speculate about the frail man on a dialysis machine who could not possibly have survived the aerial bombardment at the start of the Afghan war hiding out in a cave in Tora Bora.

Does it matter? Actors change and the show goes on. Now and then a "radical" Muslim youth guilty of the equivalent of the pub banter that those in authority "all ought to be shot" and that "he'd be the first send them to hell" gets arrested, as recently in Germany, proof that terrorism is alive and kicking although incapable of going beyond the stage of wishful thinking, possibly helped by a good measure of entrapment from the security services. When this doesn't suffice and people stop tuning into the series, something more dramatic gets orchestrated to attract the crowds back to the set: a real explosion in a place where security is easy to evade, for example Marrakesh. The entrance roads to all major Moroccan towns now sport police check points where police do exactly what their Western counterparts do: cash in on the suffering of ordinary people. In Morocco they specialise in taking bribes of motorists (akin to the use of speed cameras in the West), whereas in Europe and America they sell expensive body scanners.

Incidentally, amongst the innocent victims of the carnage in Marrakesh was an Israeli who lived in Shanghai and visited his relatives in Morocco for Passover, putting paid to the lie that Jews (at least those who were not persuaded by the Zionists to migrate to Israel) could not live peacefully amongst their Muslim neighbours in Arab countries. But who pays notice to the facts? Who goes back to the original 9/11 videos and wonders how comes that airoplanes made from lightweight metal penetrate undamaged through buildings made from concrete and heavy steel, melting into the structure and even popping out the other side? It does not matter whether the attack happened as presented on the television screens, what matters for the ordinary viewer is who ordered it, and since Osama has now sunk to the bottom of the sea, the good guys have finally regained the upper hand again in this cops and robbers show. Two questions are never asked (or allowed to ask): who wrote the original script and who benefits from the outcome?

Since the war on terror is mainly fought in the media, anything goes. New wars can now be fought without a declaration of war upon the spurious excuse that we must protect rebels who want to overthrow their government against the repercussions from the the machine of state. By that logic America should have supported the IRA aforetime against the British government who did not willingly give in to their demands. Or the Palestinians against Israel, for that matter, but for sympathy for the underdog to go quite that far is, of course, unthinkable.

Sadly, the people are always the losers. Playing on their hopes of real democracy and fears of terror and violence, the world is being restructured. European countries are turning into police states in order to deal with the expected disquiet over the economic meltdown caused by fraudulent bank created credit. Sudan is partitioned in order to put an end to the war over the oil fields found at the disputed border line. Egypt retains a military government but is given a secular, rather than Islamic, constitution. American stooges who willingly agree to be written out of the script are rewarded with a gracious pension, from Idi Amin to Husni Mubarak. Those who refuse and want to carry on playing a major role, are punished severely, such as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. And with some, the script writers had simply forgotten to carry on their story, so Osama, long since dead, had to be publicly killed once more to achieve closure. Maybe Obama, having only just recently released his own birth certificate after many years of agonising hesitation, can now proceed to fake his near namesake's death certificate.