ARAB NEWS: DAMMAM: Prominent Riyadh-based Saudi journalist Jamal A. Khashoggi, who fought alongside Afghans and other Arabs including Osama Bin Laden in the war against the erstwhile Soviet Union in the 1980s, described Bin Laden’s killing as no big news. “If you ask me, it is no news because I expected this to happen a long time ago,” he told Arab News in an exclusive interview.Khashoggi said the fact that Osama survived for this long after Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was the real story. “It was a big failure of US intelligence,” he said.
According to him it is a very peculiar thing to happen in a very peculiar year. “The news of his killing comes at a time when the Al-Qaeda ideology has been completely rejected by the Arab world. Al-Qaeda was in eclipse … to be very specific it was buried in January 2011 in Tahrir Square in Cairo,” he said, referring to the massive people’s movement that swept aside longtime Egyptian ruler Hosni Mubarak.
“In a sense it is the right ending for Osama because the recent development in the Arab world clearly indicated that there was no place for him or his ideology,” said Khashoggi. “The rise of the nonviolent movement in the Arab world was the complete rejection of the Al-Qaeda philosophy.”
Khashoggi said he felt sorry that Bin Laden chose the wrong path when he was at the crossroads of history. “He hijacked our religion and chose the path of violence. I remember how we were all in the grip of violence in the early and mid-2000s, here in Saudi Arabia, Algeria … there were suicide bombings, bomb blasts, killings. His ideology did not conform with my understanding of Islam,” he said. » | Siraj Wahab | Arab News | Monday, May 02, 2011
