25th Anniversary Of US Bombing Of Libya

The Washington Post reports:

TRIPOLI, LIBYA —Moammar Gaddafi’s glamorous daughter, Aisha, showed a different public face Friday morning, delivering a defiant and venomous speech to an adoring crowd from the ruins of a building in her father’s Tripoli compound, 25 years to the day after it was hit by U.S. warplanes.

“When I was a child, when I was 9 years old, in this house, a rain of missiles and bombs came down. They tried to kill me,” she said, speaking from a second-floor balcony pockmarked by shrapnel. “After 25 years, the same missiles, the same bombs are raining on our children’s heads.”

Shortly after that raid on April 15, 1986, the young Aisha was photographed holding her fist in the air. Since then, the woman known as “Libya’s Claudia Schiffer” for her supermodel looks has trained as a lawyer, served as a U.N. goodwill ambassador and courted controversy by joining Saddam Hussein’s defense team and speaking out in support of the Irish Republican Army.

On Friday, she appeared in her element, decrying Italy for killing her grandfather when it invaded Libya 100 years ago and the West for wanting to kill her father. “God damn their hands,” she said.

As the crowd whipped itself into a frenzy with cries of “The people want Moammar Gaddafi,” and “Allah, Moammar, Libya, that’s all we need,” Aisha, 34, paused for effect every few minutes, adjusting her green-and-black head scarf, pumping her fist or motioning to the crowd to chant louder.

“We are asking the West .?.?. these civilians you are protecting, are you talking about the people who are holding machine guns, RPGs and bombs?” she said. “Are these civilians, the ones who are killing people and eating dead people’s hearts?” she asked, echoing government statements about al-Qaeda operatives supposedly running the Libyan rebellion.

Since NATO airstrikes began March 19, thousands of Libyans have assembled each night in the fields of the compound, Bab al-Aziziyah, or Splendid Gate, offering themselves as human shields to protect the man who styles himself Libya’s “Brother Leader.”

“He is my father. He is the father of all of us,” said Fatma al-Alem, 34, who said she has slept in the compound every night since mid-March with her husband and three sons. “He solved all our problems. He is protecting the country,” she said, adding that she was willing to die for Gaddafi. “I am not scared. We will die only once.”

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