Osama bin Laden's son: why I refused to follow in my father's footstepsOmar bin Laden says he would 'like to be in a position to promote peace' in interview in which he recalls hearing about 9/11 attacksMark Tran guardian.co.uk, Article history Omar bin Laden would like to promote peace in a United Nations role. Photograph: Maria Laura Antonelli/Rex Features  Having a famous father is not always easy: the burden of expectation can weigh heavily on young shoulders. So what to do when your surname is Bin Laden?In an interview with the New Statesman, Omar bin Laden, the fourth eldest son of the world's most wanted man, reveals himself as someone definitely not cut from the same cloth as his father.Asked whether he plans to enter politics or public life, Omar says: "I do not believe that I would be a good politician – I have a habit of speaking the truth, even when it does not serve me well. But I would like to be in a position to promote peace. I believe that the United Nations would be ideal for me."Omar ended contact with his father, Osama bin Laden, in April 2001. He says he was asked once to take up arms at a meeting with his father's fighters."His sons were in attendance, although none of us was a fighter," Omar says. "He spoke of how it is a great honour to give one's life for Islam and said anyone who wanted to give their life should put their name on a paper in the mosque."He never asked me to join al-Qaida, but he did tell me I was the son chosen to carry on his work. He was disappointed when I said I was not suited to that life. I do not like disagreement or violence."As for his memory of the 11 September 2001 attacks in America that have made the Bin Laden name infamous, Omar says he was staying in the home of his father's mother in Jeddah at the time."I had been sound asleep and was woken by my uncle yelling: 'Look what your father has done!'."I went into the sitting area and my family were gathered around the television. I soon learned that America was under attack. It was a very sad day." Omar, however, does not believe that his father was behind the attack."I did not agree with my uncle's reaction. I never thought my father was capable of the carnage in America – it was too big for his small organisation."I cannot speak for my father's family. This topic is too painful for us to talk about. We were all so shocked by the suffering of those poor people that, after that morning, none of us ever had a conversation about it."Omar has, however, decided to bare all in a book, Growing Up Bin Laden, Osama's Wife and Son take us Inside their…

  Does Japan still matter?
By Fred Hiatt
Friday, December 11, 2009
TOKYO U.S.-Japan relations are in "crisis," Japan's foreign minister told me Thursday -- but I would guess that few Americans have noticed, let alone felt alarm. As China rises, Japan's economy has stalled, and its population is dwindling. The island nation -- feared during the last century first as a military power, then as an economic conqueror -- barely registers in the American imagination. But Japan still matters. And despite the "crisis" set in motion by the electoral defeat of the party that had ruled for half a century, the United States has more to fear from Japanese defeatism -- from its own uncertainty about whether it still matters -- than from the assertiveness of its new government. At a seminar here this week organized by the German Marshall Fund and the Tokyo Foundation, and in separate interviews, one Japanese after another delivered variations on gloom, doom and pessimism. Polls confirm that this is no anomaly; in one taken by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper last spring, the three words offered most often to describe the current era were "unrest," "stagnation" and "bleak," as the paper's editor in chief, Yoichi Funabashi, noted recently in Foreign Affairs. "Japan's presence in the international community is rapidly weakening and waning," one prominent businessman said this week. "We have to bring Japan back to high growth, but that possibility now is nil. . . . There are heaps of difficulties facing Japan . . . insurmountable . . . Japanese people are so anxious. . . . We don't need to remain a major country. . . . 'Small-nation Japan' is my thinking." Japan's fiscal challenges are daunting, as is its declining birthrate. Yet the negativity seems overblown. Japan retains the world's second-largest national economy and will be third or fourth biggest for decades to come. It is the world's second-largest aid donor, the fifth-biggest military spender (despite a constitution that bars the waging of war) and a technological powerhouse. It is a crucial player, and frequently America's closest ally, in international organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. And as the longest-standing and most successful democracy in the non-Western world, it is a hugely important role model, and potentially a leader, in supporting freedom and the rule of law. That potential was sharply enhanced by the landslide victory of the Democratic Party of Japan in August, ending what one speaker at the seminar called the Liberal Democratic "shogunate." The Democrats have promised to disrupt the cozy relationship among bureaucrats, the ruling party and industry, and to govern with more public input and accountability. But they're also disrupting the U.S.-Japan relationship. An agreement to realign U.S. Marine bases in Okinawa has been put on hold, despite what U.S. officials took as a promise from Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama ("Trust me," he privately told President Obama, according to Japanese officials) to implement the deal. The Democrats' coalition partners, as…

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