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There is ample reason to feel relief that Osama bin Laden is no longer a threat to the world,he deemed enemies and the world needs less of such zealotry, not more.
However, relief was not the dominant emotion presented to America when bin Laden’s death was announced. And in this we see bin Laden’s more enduring victory , a victory that will unfortunately last far beyond his passing.
For decades, America has held in contempt those who actively celebrate death. When we’ve seen videos of Islamists cheering terrorist attacks against America, we have ignored their insistence that they are celebrating merely because the US has occupied their nations and killed their people. Instead, only because they are increasing the death of US innocents, but because, more fundamentally, they are celebrating death itself.
But in the years since 9/11, the US had begun vaguely mimicking those we say we despise, sometimes celebrating bloodshed against those we see as Bad Guys just as vigorously as our enemies celebrate bloodshed against innocent Americans they (wrongly) deem as Bad Guys. Indeed, an America that once carefully refrained from flaunting pictures of American victims for fear of engaging in ugly death euphoria now ogles pictures of Uday and Qusay’s corpses, rejoices over images of Saddam Hussein’s hanging and throws a party at news that bin Laden was shot .
This is bin Laden’s lamentable victory: He has changed America’s psyche from one that saw violence as a regrettable-if-sometimes-necessary act into one that finds euphoria in news of bloodshed.
Again, this isn’t in any way to equate Americans who cheer on bin Laden’s death with, say, those who cheered after 9/11. Bin Laden was a mass murderer who had punishment coming to him, while the 9/11 victims were innocent civilians whose deaths are an unspeakable tragedy. Likewise, this isn’t to say that we should feel nothing at bin Laden’s neutralization, or that the announcement isn't cause for any positive feeling at all , it most certainly is.
But it is to say that the US reaction to the news last night should be the kind often exhibited by victims’ families at a perpetrator’s lethal injection ,a reaction typically marked by both muted relief but also by sadness over the fact that the perpetrators’ innocent victims are gone forever, the fact that the perpetrator's death cannot change the past, and the fact that our world continues to produce such monstrous perpetrators in the first place.
"USA! USA! USA!” at news of yet more killing in a now unending back-and-forth war , it’s a sign for the US to be inadvertently letting the monsters win.
