You keep talking like this, pal, and … you’ll probably be elected to the European Parliament, I guess.

Or maybe they’ll give him a weekly column in the Guardian. “Bin Laden’s Hideout,” they could call it.

The statement said the family was asking why the leader of Al Qaeda “was not arrested and tried in a court of law so that truth is revealed to the people of the world.” Citing the trials of Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, the statement questioned “the propriety of such assassination where not only international law has been blatantly violated,” but the principles of presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial were ignored…

“We want to remind the world that Omar bin Laden, the fourth-born son of our father, always disagreed with our father regarding any violence and always sent messages to our father, that he must change his ways and that no civilians should be attacked under any circumstances,” the statement said. “Despite the difficulty of publicly disagreeing with our father, he never hesitated to condemn any violent attacks made by anyone, and expressed sorrow for the victims of any and all attacks.”

Condemning the shooting of one of the Qaeda leader’s wives during the assault on May 2 in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the statement added: “As he condemned our father, we now condemn the president of the United States for ordering the execution of unarmed men and women.”

His dad, of course, famously declared war on America in the 1990s and then even more famously proved how serious he was about following through on it. That’s his idea of an “unarmed man” whose group specialized in surprise suicide attacks, a fact keen on the SEALs’ minds as they went in. Here’s a bit more from the statement. For a guy who chose a different career path, he sure does seem to have a high regard for Osama’s status:

The statement, attributed to Omar bin Laden, bin Laden’s fourth eldest son, said the al Qaeda chief’s children reserved the right to take legal action in the United States and internationally to “determine the true fate of our vanished father,” the SITE Intelligence Group said…

The letter said, in part: “We hold the American President (Barack) Obama legally responsible to clarify the fate of our father, Osama bin Laden, for it is unacceptable, humanely and religiously, to dispose of a person with such importance and status among his people, by throwing his body into the sea in that way, which demeans and humiliates his family and his supporters and which challenges religious provisions and feelings of hundreds of millions of Muslims.”

Sounds like Omar’s not in the “Bin Laden wasn’t a true Muslim” camp. In fairness to him, despite his early training alongside his pop, I’ve never heard of him having links to terrorism apart from his patrilineage. He is prone to saying inane things about how Osama must have been “sorry” for 9/11, but he himself has condemned the attack — albeit in the course of listing his objections to various American military actions. So today’s note isn’t so much jihadist propaganda as it is old-fashioned moral equivalence. Like I say, there’s got to be an elective office waiting somewhere for him on the continent.

When told about the Bin Laden family’s objections, a stunned Joe Biden could only mutter, “Are you kidding?” Exit question: Forget about Omar Bin Laden. What about Hamza Bin Laden, another son, who was supposedly in the compound during the SEALs’ raid but wasn’t killed or captured? Did he actually … escape?