Osama bin Laden – A Pointless and Irrelevant Life?

“A middle-aged nonentity, a political failure outstripped by history – by the millions of Arabs demanding freedom and democracy in the Middle East – died in Pakistan yesterday.”

On May the 2^nd, Osama bin Laden was killed in a raid by SEAL Team VI, part of the US Military’s Joint Special Operations Command or JSOC, “JaySock.” For many his death was proof of the aphorism that if you live by the sword, you die by the sword. On a personal level, although I will not shed tears for his passing, the fact that he was killed and not captured is a concern and his followers will no doubt kill more to insist they are still relevant. Regardless of my personal feeling that relevance is what I’m talking about today.

Response to his death has varied enormously around the world.

Ismail Haniyeh from Hamas, stated that they condemned “the assassination and the killing of an Arab holy warrior. We ask God to offer him mercy with the true believers and the martyrs.”

Our own Tun Doctor Mahathir was reported in the Sun as saying that although he was “indeed guilty” his death was “actually revenge…revenge by the US for the Sept 11 attack.” This statement all by itself was a change in direction for the man who stated in 2010 that “I am not sure now that Muslim terrorists carried out these attacks. There is evidence that the attacks were staged. If they can make Avatar, they can make anything,”

Geoffrey Robertson QC, a man worth listening to on human rights and prosecutions for war crimes published recently in the Independent newspaper that the death and the response of ordinary Americans to it endorsed “what looks increasingly like a cold-blooded assassination ordered by a president who, as a former law professor, knows the absurdity of his statement that “justice was done.” He argues instead that a trial would have been better as this “would have been the best way of de-mystifying this man, debunking his cause and de-brainwashing his followers. In the dock he would have been reduced in stature – never more remembered as the tall, soulful figure on the mountain, but as a hateful and hate-filled old man, screaming from the dock or lying from the witness box.”

It’s hard to disagree with Mr. Robertson, despite the difficulties and dangers such a trial would have entailed.

In America though, the news was almost consistently joyful and enthusiastic about the death of man who obviously was so proud of the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington. Rush Limbaugh, a right-wing demagogue even managed to cross the political divide by praising President Obama for ordering the raid.

Jon Stewart, host of the fake news program, “The Daily Show” admitted "I am way too close to this whole episode to be rational about this…Last night was a good night - not just for New York or D.C. - but for human people." Jon Stewart is a New York resident who lives only a few blocks from the site of the old World Trade Centre. He made no attempt to hide his happiness that Osama was dead; but he did raise a point that very few other commentators did.

He commented that for 10 years the face of the Muslim world had been that of Osama bin Laden, but now the face of the Muslim world were the young Arabs of Egypt and Tunisia; of Libya and the Yemen. Whereas al-Qa’ida and bin Laden had for 10 years gotten the world’s attention through desperate acts, their opportunity was now gone Stewart continued.

Robert Fisk, the noted Middle East watcher and correspondent opened his column in the Independent on May 3^rd by saying “A middle-aged nonentity, a political failure outstripped by history – by the millions of Arabs demanding freedom and democracy in the Middle East – died in Pakistan yesterday.”

Fisk mirrored Stewarts view even more by continuing that “the mass revolutions in the Arab world over the past four months mean that al-Qa’ida was already politically dead. Bin Laden told the world – indeed, he told me personally – that he wanted to destroy the pro-Western regimes in the Arab world, the dictatorships of the Mubaraks and the Ben Alis. He wanted to create a new Islamic Caliphate. But these past few months, millions of Arab Muslims rose up and were prepared for their own martyrdom – not for Islam but for freedom and liberty and democracy. Bin Laden didn't get rid of the tyrants. The people did. And they didn't want a caliph.”

For many young Arabs and Muslims around the world, Osama and al-Qai’ida offered a way to fight back against the life they lived and the forces that kept them down. The enemy was simple and death was a better option than the life they lived every day.

The recruitment practices of al-Qa’ida were entirely the same as those practiced by the SA, Sturm Abteilung, (Storm Troopers) of the Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan of Southern America, even the Aum Shinrikyo of Japan. Identify the disenfranchised, the dissatisfied, the afraid the spiritually empty and those who feel guilty about their success. Exaggerate the pain, strengthen the pain and then tell them who is responsible and how death (either theirs or yours) will solve all things.

But as Robert Fisk said, “It was interesting that after the Egyptian overthrow of Mubarak the first thing we heard from Al Qaeda a week later was a call for the overthrow of Mubarak, one week after he'd gone, it was pathetic.”