The latest inhumane treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay is so excruciatingly torturous that it would make even Dick Cheney squirm: Detainees are being forced to read Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father !
Okay, that’s not exactly true. Unlike American schoolchildren, the prisoners are covered by the Geneva Convention, which protects them from having to endure the President’s existential musings. But despite this being one of the key perks of confinement, they are choosing to subject themselves to the exquisite prose of Obama’s memoir:
Journalist Besan Sheikh recently visited the Guantanamo Bay prison facility run by the US, where al-Qaeda and other prisoners from Bush’s ‘war on terror’ are held. (Many of the prisoners appear to have been sold by the Taliban or swept up indiscriminately in the vicinity of a battlefield). Sheikh told the pan-Arab London daily, al-Hayat [Life], that the facility’s library now has 13,500 books .
What are the three most requested titles by the remaining 229 prisoners ?
1. The Harry Potter novels
2. Cervantes’ Don Quixote
3. Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father.
No reason was given for these choices, which are followed in popularity by Muslim religious volumes.
Obama’s book may just be a Sun Tzu-esque “know thine enemy” homework assignment. The Cervantes novel may be easy to explain too: For this group, Quixote may not be a comic figure but a role model for their own ridiculous and pointlessly destructive quests.
But the allure of the Harry Potter novels for this group is harder to understand. What is it they find so appealing about the young wizard? Do the would-be terrorists identify with Harry and his heroic chums or with Voldemort and his Death Eaters? Or is it simply that Rowling’s has the ability to put anyone—even hardened jihadists—under her spell?
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