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Re: [RC] [RC] bin Ladens son wants to put on an Endurance Ride across Africa - Maryanne GabbaniI don't know how much an endurance ride would do for world peace...it would be nice to think that it would help but I think that the wheels that are in motion in Iraq, Afghanistan and so on are rather large ones and not likely to be influenced by a bunch of people on horses.Politics aside, like I said, I think that I met this guy at a neighbour's one night and he seemed pretty normal to me (good friends of mine will attest that normality is not always a judgment I should be making). I'll have to email his cousin and ask if the family thinks that he's just talking through his hat or if he is serious. I've actually corresponded with The Duck about rides out here (he sounds like my kind of grouch) and the real obstacle to things of this magnitude, or even of lesser magnitudes, is the government "assistance" that one is likely to receive. Even trying to lay out treks of a decent length for fun runs into the issues of Antiquities land vs Army land vs Who the hell are you crazy people anyway and should you be riding around out here without some kind of guards for you?. I can find legions of bureaucratic minions whose only experiences with horses are the patoots working down the hall from them and they will assure me that the ride I took a lovely Swiss woman on yesterday through the pyramid fields of Sakkara, the palm groves and villages down to the lake (more of a marsh at this time of year) for lunch and back through the desert cannot possibly be done and that it is totally illegal. I bet that Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and so on can replicate these guys without difficulty. On the other hand, also as I mentioned before, the members of the Binladen family that I know are well educated, intelligent, responsible people who also have a strong family network all over the Arab world, and if anyone could pull something like that off, it would be them. The generation that produced Osama Binladen was raised in separate households all over the Arab world, since the children usually lived with their mothers in the mother's home country. A Muslim is only allowed four legal wives at a time, something that the patriarch sort of sidestepped with a form of serial polygamy, but it meant that the kids were not raised together and that the family as a whole really isn't responsible for the rather spectacular black sheep that they inadvertently (and the CIA with much more involvement in his development) created. The family that I know are far more corporate minded and involved in the construction industry than they are political....nor are they fanatical Muslim fundamentalists at all. I'll ask my friends in the family here if he was serious or just having fun with the press. Maryanne On Jan 18, 2008 2:43 AM, John Teeter <
johnt@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
-- Maryanne Stroud Gabbani msgabbani@xxxxxxxxx Egypt Face to Face www.alsorat.com Weblogs: Living In Egypt miloflamingo.blogspot.com Cairo/Giza Daily Photo cairogizadailyphoto.blogspot.com Turn Right At The Sarcophagus haramlik.blogspot.com Photos of Egypt: http://www.flickr.com/photos/livinginegypt/
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