IN BATHING BIN LADEN

Let's just leave aside for the moment that Wafah Dufour has taken to posing in a bath for GQ, and focus on the slightly more curious aspect of her interview for the magazine. Six months ago, she was banging on about how she didn't want to be connected to her uncle any more - that's twinkly old Uncy Osama Bin Laden - and how she was changing her name to break all the links with negative publicity that it brought. (And, to the best of our knowledge, this was the second time she'd made a similar fuss.)

Now, half a year on, and she's giving another interview about how she's not really in any way connected to him. For someone keen to play down the links, she's quite talkative about them - it's probably lucky she's not on witness protection; she'd have her name changed, a new life, a new town - and a blue plaque outside the house saying "Bin Laden's Neice Lives Here":

"Everyone relates me to that man, and I have nothing to do with him," Wafah Dufour, the daughter of bin Laden's half brother, Yeslam Binladin, says in the January edition of the magazine, referring to the al-Qaida leader.

"I want to be accepted here, but I feel that everybody's judging me and rejecting me," said the California-born Dufour, a law graduate who lives in New York. "Come on, where's the American spirit? Accept me. I want to be embraced, because my values are like yours. And I'm here. I'm not hiding."

You see? Her records aren't selling because people see the name and do some research and find out who her uncle is and think that if they play her CD then the terrorists will have won.

It doesn't seem to have occured to Wafah that there might be another, slightly less convoluted reason for her failing to unseat Mariah Carey at the top of the charts. Perhaps her records are so bad, nobody wants to buy them in their own right?

Mind you, the US Army might be interested - imagine the irony if they used Osama's neice instead of Eminem as part of the torture process for Al-Qaeda "suspects"...

music wafah dufour