Welcome to the UK - future home of the Bin Laden family?

The couple

A 52 year-old British woman, with five previous marriages (as well as three children and five grandchildren under her belt), has married a 26 year-old Saudi man who was already married with a child of his own (but claims he has since obtained a legal divorce).

Sounds like a great start for a marriage? It gets even worse. Much worse. The groom's name is Omar Bin Laden, and he is the son of Osama Bin Laden. Yes, that Osama Bin Laden. So why would he want to marry this woman? I'll give you one guess. From the Daily Mail:Bin Laden's son wants a visa - so he and his grandmother bride can live in Cheshire [UK] and have a surrogate baby.

Omar claims he hasn't seen his father for years, but he did attend terrorist training camps when he was younger, probably until age 19 (he is a little vague about how much time was spent there). He publicly criticizes terrorism, but refuses to criticize his father, or acknowledge that Osama or Al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11. Omar is not on any international arrest warrant, but because of his name, he does of course have difficulties in traveling.

The bride was born Paula Joy Hanson, but has had many names over the years. These days she goes by either "Jane Felix-Browne" or "Zaina Al Sabah". You can look at this odd couple's entire "romantic" photo series if you want, but it's entirely obvious that she's being used and that Omar sees little in her other than her status as a UK citizen to grant him legal residence. I'm guessing that deep down she knows this, but she is enjoying "being used" in this fashion, and thrilled to recapture her spent youth that she has desperately tried to bring back through numerous flings and multiple plastic surgeries (she met Omar in Egypt after making several trips there for low-cost surgeries).

She denies his intentions are anything other than true love:

She scoffs at her critics who say she is just another naive, middle-aged British woman who has let herself be flattered by a young man with an eye on a cosy life in the UK.

"Look, he doesn't need me to get a visa to come to England. All he needs to do is go to the British Embassy in Saudi. It's ridiculous to say he is using me for that. London is full of Bin Ladens. Many of his uncles and aunts are here."

To say London is "full of Bin Ladens" is a bit of a stretch, although there are quite a few Bin Ladens around. Osama's father had a total of 22 wives and 55 children in his lifetime, and there are now somewhere around 600 members of the Bin Laden family, many of them quite wealthy, and able to visit the UK as tourists without much difficulty (other than frequent delays at airports). However, permanent residence and obtaining a UK passport is another matter entirely.

A little more background on the bride from the above article:

She gets tetchy when she talks about taking her husbands' names.

"For a while I called myself Wakefield (during her marriage to John Wakefield). Then when I married Andrew Yeomans, he wanted me to take his name, too. I said: 'Enough with these bloody names.'"

Somewhere along the way, she also acquired the name Zaina Mohamad al Sabah - presumably when she converted to Islam as a teenager?

"I never said I converted," she exclaims angrily. She won't elaborate, but has previously claimed Arabic parentage. Her parents are reported as being a George and Beryl Hanson. She refuses to clear up the matter.

"My religion is a very private matter. It doesn't matter how I became a Muslim. Only that my Islamic faith is very important to me."

For all the holes in Jane's story - all of which give the impression that even she doesn't know who she is - we do know that she was a Muslim by the time she got married for the first time, at the age of 16.

This union - like her current one - was an Islamic religious marriage not recognised in law. She won't name the man, but tells me that the pressures of trying to have it formally recognised in this country helped destroy it.

That, however, was not an excuse she could use for the collapse of four subsequent legal marriages - all to non-Muslims.

The first was to fur-cutter Anthony Lomas in 1979, followed by Hell's Angel John Metcalfe, electronics company boss John Wakefield, then RAC man Andrew Yeomans. She talks a little about why each marriage collapsed, concluding that the only common denominator was a clash of cultures - between her faith and their way of life.

"All my husbands after that had a problem with my faith,' she says. 'None of them understood how important it was to my life."

Nowhere in this article does she seem to realize that might have been due to her incessant attempts to redefine herself. This woman who has had more identities, professions, and body modifications than she has had birthdays might be vainly searching for something that isn't really there. For someone who claims that her Islamic faith is so meaningful to her, she leads a distinctly un-Islamic lifestyle and one wonders if she has ever even read the Koran.

In any case, there's no law against being eccentric and normally I would consider her psychological issues to be entirely her own business. But in marrying Omar Bin Laden, it suddenly makes it the business of the UK (and indeed, the entire EU), for now she is opening up a new home to the Bin Laden family, complete with right of residence, UK citizenship and all the generous family reunification benefits thereof. In other words, eventually Omar's immediate family, and their immediate families, and so on and so on, can also apply for their own visas, setting up an unending chain migration that can only hasten the demise of London, aka "Londonistan".

Of course, the UK could simply deny the man's entry or refuse to recognize this "marriage" in the first place. But unless they have a solid legal reason to do so, Mrs Bin Laden will simply appeal it up to the European Court of Human Rights (with full backing of the Muslim Council of Britain).

H/T - I originally found this story via Jammiewearingfool, and decided to dig a little farther into it. They wrote:

If the Brits are dumb enough to let him in the country, they deserve all the headaches that'll come with it.

Indeed.

Oh I forgot to mention one more thing. The new couple want to become known as "peace activists". Makes sense. Actually, they would fit in quite nicely with most "peace activists" I know...

I wish Mr. and Mrs. Felix-Browne/Al Sabah/Bin Laden, all the best. They are going to need it; my decidedly unscientific prediction is that the marriage will dissolve after two years (the time frame at which one is awarded indefinite leave to remain in the UK). I haven't been less confident of a marriage since Michael Jackson married Lisa Marie Presley...





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