You’re an up-and-coming pop star. You finally got an agent. You look fabulous. Then your uncle, who you don’t even talk to, totally masterminds a plan to fly jetliners into the World Trade Center! How uncool is that? Well, maybe not so uncool. Wafah Dufour, a niece of Al-Qaeda kingpin Osama Bin Laden, is about to get her own reality show, about the trials of being a fledgling pop star, thanks to Judith Regan, the publisher and media heavy who signed Dufour last week to do the show, apparently out of sympathy for the young woman’s plight: “She wants to be recognized as a serious artist, and in the middle of all this, suddenly her uncle does something so terrifying and horrifying, and she has to deal with that,” says Regan, who was not asked, apparently, whether she had ever heard of Dufour before her uncle became notorious.

Wafah isn’t the first in her family to capitalize on the tragedy of 9/11. Her mother, Carmen Dufour bin Laden, is the author of the bestseller “Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia,” published in 2004. Wafah, an American who also has Swiss nationality, was born in Santa Monica but grew up in Saudi Arabia and Geneva. She says she no longer speaks to her father, and has little to do with the bin Laden clan, even dropping the name to distance herself from the family’s terrorist black sheep. Surely, her recent signing is, if anything is, irrefutable proof that there is no bad publicity.

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