Bin Laden's killing: the joy of the world is a tribute to democracy
Published in Il Giornale, 3rd May 2011
It is not spirit of revenge, neither is it savagery that took the jubilant American crowds to the streets for Bin Laden's death. There is sense of reality, common sense, unity, and in particular the will to live without guilt or nagging thoughts about an hypothetical Western arrogance. All this has been revealed in Capital Hill and Ground Zero, full of assertive and joyful crowds, against what becomes hazier within a society that day in, day out, is falling prey to a sense of atonement, prone to justify terrorists.
This is not about compensation, it's about restitution. We - Europeans ourselves - are those young Americans who rejoice in the streets for Bin Laden’s killing, whether we want to admit it or not, whether we are gnawed by ideological hesitations or not. Families holdind the portraits of their killed beloved, burnt or jumping out of the 30th floor; uniformed soldiers, ultimately proud of a war that the world has been questioning for ten years; the firefighters who rushed to aid the crowd; all the Newyorkers who saw the devil in that cloud of dust and death... They altogether have celebrated a basic and simple victory, which is the death of a criminal, an Islamist Hitler, who wanted to turn the earth into a crater of hatred. Without him the world is a better place.
Targeted killings occur when the terrorist can strike back when you are able to finally get him: that's why you act when you can finally do it, without losing the chance. As for Bin Laden, both the conditions were appropriate after 12 years of hunting and dozens of thousand of deaths.
The atrocious essence of terrorism is the denial of all rights that have been built in centuries of Jewish-Christian controversial thoughts; it is the impossibility to gather, to enter a public place without been searched, it is the necessity to be controlled in the airports, the danger to ride on buses, trains, subways; to hang out in bars, restaurants, markets, even offices and schools that blow up because of a obsessed shahid... Terrorism harms every liberty. It is the grief for an immediate and unbelivable loss; it's a thousand of crippled persons; it is the global psychological shift that scares our time and our world, from Yemen to London, from Paris to Jerusalem, and Mombasa, Bali, Mumbai and New York...
Our spoiled society has never understood how all this can happen; it's something beyond our own understanding. Many in the media, they even bought the terrorists' version for their reasons. Hamas, a committed terrorist organization, yesterday outrageously mourned Bin Laden as a "Arab holy warrior", as he is known, declaring: "The American policy is based on oppression and on shedding of Arab and Muslim blood".
The American crowds in the streets demonstrate that the US that we love, democratic and strong, from Roosevelt to Bush, is not ashamed of being right, of fighting to win. Placards reported "Obama one-Osama zero"; "This is the apocalypse, and we win". The perveted idea of building a mosque at Ground Zero left some empty space to the solemn "Amazing Grace" hymn. The American people know what takes to stand against evil and know that Bin Laden's killing is part of that struggle. That's the reason why they celebrated.
It was not Bin Laden who invented terrorism, with his Palestinian mentor Abd Allah Yussef Al Azzam. However, it was Bin Laden's strategy, to bring terrorism through Al-Qaeda to a global and mass dimension. It was Bin Laden who easily picked enemies everywhere around the world, of all ages, all religions including his own, to make them targets of a meticulously death plan. It was Bin Laden who explained those deaths in an atonic and flat voice, with a neutral and pale expression, down an ecologic bush or a primordial stone. Bin Laden used to write in Arabic his theories of hatred, imbued with Quranic references. No one realised that, until the great historian Bernard Lewis warned us all in 1998: beware that this terrorist writes even on the newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi a declaration of war against all "Crusaders and Jews", and this means that those who do not believe to his version of Islam must be killed in his war for the world's calliphate.
Until 9/11 no one understood how dangerous Bin Laden was. Not even when people in the Arab States, celebrating his massacres, used to take the streets dancing in joy and dishing out candies. We have been living in the illusion that fanatics are a tiny minority. When Obama says that he has not waged war against Islam, he is right. But whoever among us ever did it? It is Islam that attacked the West all the times: Bin Laden, Ahmadinejad, Hamas, Hezbollah and their well-funded heirs... It is the Islamic terrorism which represents the great, arrogant and fierce enemy that we all must fight. Now that the US gained 1-0, Europe must take good care not to draw this match.