...shouting 'Yippee ki yay Mother f***ers!'
US citizen's celebrate the summary execution of Osama Bin Laden
Here, from Europe, the displays of joy on the killing of Obama are unseemly to all but the relatives of the European victims of the attack on the Twin Towers who happen to believe in summary justice and capital punishment.
Certainly, no Christian can claim to rejoice in the killing of any one or accept the taking of revenge as a Christian value. Moreover, personalising the victory in such a way is infantile. It is the US comic book politics that country reserves for its foreign policy. Obama is Superman now, and the US has completely disavowed Kissinger's killing me softly approach.
It was Doris Lessing in her science fiction books, Shikasta and others, who talked of the importance of trials as a way of clarifying people's thoughts on global issues.Nuremberg did the job. The Hague. Then you even have the example of the Stalinist show trials. They served a purpose. We were supposed to condemn the victims, but instead we condem the Stalinist court. We observed the McCarthyite committee's decision making and its use of informers like Ronald Reagan. In this case too, the act of judging allowed us to judge those who judged. At the Rivonia trial in South Africa Mandela was able to clarify his position to the worlds press. He had the opportunity to do so.
Trials are useful solutions in politics, if the objective is to apportion culpability after precipitating out the key events and participants. But by putting someone on trial you also risk being judged. By examining Osama Bin Laden you examine the beginnings of Jihadism you reveal the way the US manipulated and fostered it in order to try and eliminate nationalism and socialism in lesser developed countries.
Trials are useful solutions in politics, if the objective is to apportion culpability after precipitating out the key events and participants. But by putting someone on trial you also risk being judged. By examining Osama Bin Laden you examine the beginnings of Jihadism you reveal the way the US manipulated and fostered it in order to try and eliminate nationalism and socialism in lesser developed countries.
The idea of bringing someone someone like Osama Bin Laden to justice is an excellent one to allow us to confront and then examine the Muslim idea of divine Justice that people like Osama constantly called on. Imagine the arrogance of an upper class Saudi like Osama, pronouncing Fatwa's. Allah c'est moi! In a deep sense, to have had an Isamic trial of Wahabiism and its malcontents would have been just what the doctor ordered.
On the eye for an eye tooth for a tooth scale of things, of course the US wins hands down. The body count for Iraq and Afghanistan far exceed the number of people killed in the Twin Towers, although, admittedly, the theatre of New York was a dramatic and shocking one for the atrocity to take place in. The kill ratio of Islamic citizens to US citizens must be at least one thousand to one.
The US has supported repressive torturing regimes in the Middle East since the end of the last war. How many people have been killed with weaponry supplied by the US? Plenty. No. It's not about 'revenge' If we are talking revenge then the US has more than 'revenged' itself on the Islamic world in the last ten years and in the 45 years preceding the September the11th attacks when there was no cause to take revenge it has also 'revenged' itself..
The issue of justice and a fair trial would have been the best way to unravel this mess.
Where I work there are lots of young people who, one way or another sympathise with the Islamist cause, if not its methods - I hope. Some of the young men even wear a sort of Muslim dress. I don't notice any sense of defeat, or loss in them. If the 'Civilisations Clashed' then they didn't clash for them. If the US has come out ahead, then pray tell me who will really be affected by this death?
A little before he announced the killing, which he watched live and close up to the gore, Obama referred to Matt Damon - at his routine during the foreign correspondent's dinner and how he 'loved him'. In doing so he framed the announcement he would make the next day in terms of a Matt Damon movie. 'Right back at you buddy.' This was a scene from a Matt Damon movie - it was designed to be so. From a Harrison Ford movie.
This show was also for a domestic prime time US 'sports channel' audience. It was framed in the competitive language of American college sport. After Obama makes his announcement he awards a medal of honour to a Hawaiian, Tony, who was a tall basketballer - Obama even self-references at this point - and the ceremony has been prefaced with an explicit link to the killing of Osama which needs to be celebrated.Killing Osama is obviously equated to a 'slam dunk' by Obama.
The whole show is hogwash of course, designed to cover up 10 years of bloody US military action in the Middle East and Afghanistan and give American intervention legitimacy again. The veterans who got the medals of honour were veterans of the war against North Korea. A clear message has been sent there.
The idea of a trial was dismissed not because the US soldiers could not have captured Osama and brought him back. Instead, he was killed because that way the world doesn't dwell on the ingredients that go into the US propaganda sausage factory. That way they don't see the American foreign policy SNAFU.
Never advisable, ever, to get up close and personal to what goes into the US foreign policy sausages, they can turn you stomach; like the images of that Apache helicopter in Iraq released by Wikileaks; watch it shoot up Iraqi reporters and cameramen, making sure they are all dead, and then later straffing a van with women and children inside with heavy fire, and celebrating afterwards.
'Yippie kai yay motherf***ers.'
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