Thursday, May 12, 2011

Rejoicing

I was supposed to feel relieved, to say the least, that Bin Laden was killed finally on May 2, 2011 after 2 years short of a decade international manhunt. But something was stirring in my gut. I felt worried and perplexed about the extent Americans have reacted on the issue--jubilant, vengeful, veering towards moral looseness. As a foreign observer, it appears to me that killing Bin Laden can be construed more easily as an act of revenge more than anything else, more than delivering justice to all aggrieved by his terroristic activities, Americans and Muslims alike.
I suppose America would have to live now under more contempt from those who identify and sympathize with what Bin Laden has not brought with him in his death.
We're very fond of saying one's spirit lives on in a good, hopeful sense. But this time, unfortunately, the spirit that the US has tried to exorcise might prove to be inextricable from the corpus of Jihadist men and women.