How Osama bin Laden's hatred of the West began on trip to William Shakespeare's birthplace as teenager

Osama bin Laden's hatred of the west began after
visiting William Shakespeare’s birthplace, newly
released CIA files have revealed.
The terror lord had written in a notebook on 6 March
2011, how he travelled to “the west” for an
unspecified “treatment” when he was in “sixth grade”
and 13 years old.
The following year the teenager, the wealthy son of a
billionaire Saudi construction tycoon, spent ten weeks
in Britain “studying”.
In the journal, Bin Laden briefly describes visiting the
home of William Shakespeare in Stratford-on-Avon but
says he was “not impressed” by British society and
culture during his time in the UK.
"I got the impression that they were a loose people,
and my age didn’t allow me to form a complete
picture of life there," he wrote.
"We went every Sunday to visit Shakespeare’s house.
"I was not impressed and I saw that they were a
society different from ours and that they were a
morally loose society."
His trip to Warwickshire convinced bin Laden that the
west was “decadent”.
The CIA has released a huge cache of files recovered
from Osama Bin Laden's computers after he was
killed in a raid at his compound in Abbottabad,
Pakistan, in May 2011.
The 470,000 files include videos including explicit
executions alongside ringtones for his phone and
cartoons such as Tom and Jerry - and Lucien Freud's
portrait of the Queen.
The CIA also recovered Bin Laden's personal journal,
which includes an entry the day before his death,
among more than 18,000 documents, while there are
approximately 79,000 audio and image files.
Among the documents is a military guide to guerrilla
warfare, apparently issued by the US Marine Corps
and a Word document called 'Ruling on Fighting
Americans Outside Iraq'.
It also includes more than 10,000 video files, featuring
a video of his son Hamza Bin Ladin as a young adult,
al-Qaeda "home videos" and the beheading of
murderer American hostage Jack Hensely.
But the more bizarre files are (a lot of) Tom and Jerry
cartoons and various children's films - including Ice
Age and Chicken Little - and, with obvious irony, a
documentary called 'Where in the World is Osama bin
Laden?'.
The jarring list of video files include titles as disparate
as 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star' and 'A mortar attack
upon al-Dowra police station in Baghdad'
In press releases that accompany the cache of
materials recovered in the raid on May 2, 2011, the
CIA said the release is an effort to further enhance
public understanding of Al-Qaeda.
The CIA also say that there are files from the
collection that remain unreleased, which include
pornography, copyrighted materials, and files that
'directly damage efforts to keep the nation secure'.

Tweet