Hannah Bloch
In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, an extraordinary photo came to light. Taken in 1971, it’s a holiday snapshot showing the Saudi bin Laden family on vacation in Sweden. There they are, twenty-two of them, with a healthy complement of brothers and sisters ranging from toddlers to tweens to twenty-somethings, posing in front of a big pink car, grinning and laughing, resplendent in crazy-patterned bell-bottoms and loud shirts. How could this family, looking so characteristic of its ’70s heyday—so Westernized, so likable, so much like us—have spawned the most virulent anti-American terrorist on earth? In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, an extraordinary photo came to light. Taken in 1971, it’s a holiday snapshot showing the Saudi bin Laden family on vacation in Sweden. There they are, twenty-two of them, with a healthy complement of brothers and sisters ranging from toddlers to tweens to twenty-somethings, posing in front of a big pink car, grinning and laughing, resplendent in crazy-patterned bell-bottoms and loud shirts. How could this family, looking so characteristic of its ’70s heyday—so Westernized, so likable, so much like us—have spawned the most virulent anti-American terrorist on earth? Seven years after the tragedy of September 11, the world has not seen an act of terrorism to match it. That’s at least some comfort, when one considers that Osama bin Laden remains at large, that suicide attacks by his sympathizers have become commonplace in countries where they were once unheard-of, and that more than four thousand US soldiers have lost their lives in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, which continue with little abatement in Islamist recruiting efforts and no end in sight.