Crazy for Osama

Take 1: You've got to have rocks in your head not to rejoice in the death of an unrepentant mass murderer.

Writing is a dangerous business. Perhaps not quite as dangerous as, say, being a US Navy Seal, but writers do face their own unique challenges. One of those challenges is the constant downward pressure on your own beliefs and opinions. When you are looking to get published, your most careful and nuanced thoughts tend to become a bit squished and compact; rules of logic devolve into rules of thumb, and cautious conclusions morph over time into potentially absurd attitudes.

Take, for example, some of the responses to the recent killing of Osama bin Laden. If one’s first instinct is to compare jubilant Americans celebrating the death of bin Laden to jubilant Muslims celebrating the death and destruction of September 11, then you are, I suspect, just a tiny bit crazy. “Diseased, sickly”, “full of cracks or flaws” and “of unsound mind or behaving as so” are all relevant etymological definitions of craziness, which in this instance manifests as an inability to see the most striking and essential differences between joy at the death of a moral monster, and joy for the death of innocents.

As Kellie Tranter wrote for the Australia’s ABC:

“The public celebrations in the West Bank after the awful events of September 11 that appalled us in the West seem somehow eerily mirrored in the celebrations we are now witnessing at the White House. Pick the difference!”

Don’t judge too harshly the remarks of such commentators. It is important to understand that for a writer, major events provoke an instinctive professional response: “Is there something I can write about this?” Being creatures of consistency and habit, it is a struggle to see each new event with the fresh eye it deserves. If your whole life is devoted to defending the weak against the strong, then you may struggle to interpret bin Laden’s death as something more than just a strong government killing a weak man. If you spend your career battling against popular ignorance or prejudice, then you will have to resist the urge to interpret popular joy at bin Laden’s demise as somehow needing correction.

As an ethicist, I am always questioning things that seem obviously good or ill. It is natural for me to question the goodness of bin Laden’s demise, simply because it seems good at face value.

This is, after all, the very definition of prejudice – it means “prior judgement” and therefore implies a preconceived opinion. If I think that the government is always untrustworthy, then I have implicitly prejudged everything the government says and does. If you believe that American imperialism is the cause of the world’s problems, then this prejudice will shape your interpretation of future events, even blinding you to the morally significant differences between celebrating the death of bin Laden and celebrating the deaths of thousands of innocent people.

So let’s lend our aggrieved commentators a hand, to help them regain their sympathy for the ordinary human response to bin Laden’s death. When Palestinians celebrated on September 11, people were appalled. Why were they appalled? Because celebration implies happiness, and happiness implies that something good has happened. In other words, the Palestinians were celebrating because they thought that the death and destruction of September 11 was a good thing. Whatever excuses might be made for such a view, we cannot deny that it is morally warped. A child in the West Bank cheering the destruction in America may be more tragic than malicious, but either way it is still perverse.

Now, if we all agree (I hope) that the terrorist attacks on September 11 were profoundly evil, then it follows that the perpetrators and instigators of the attacks deserve to be punished – to face justice. We might argue about the type of punishment bin Laden deserved, but it should at least be in proportion to the gravity of his crimes. Given that US forces were unable to successfully capture bin Laden alive, we are left with his violent death as the nearest approximation of justice.

President Obama used the word “demise“ which literally means “put away”. Having been “put away”, bin Laden is no longer able to contribute to the terrorist campaign against the West, he is no longer able to kill innocent people, he is no longer able to evade justice, and he has suffered the ultimate punishment for his past crimes. These are all good things, and of special relevance to the Americans we have seen celebrating in the streets. Their happiness is not perverse, like those who celebrated the killing of thousands of innocent civilians. Rather, their happiness is - in principle at least - an appropriate response to the very just fate of a particularly dangerous and wicked human being.

Knowing this, it can be hard to imagine why some people would be so dismissive or callous in the face of genuine relief and happiness at bin Laden’s demise, or go so far as to compare it to the perverse joy exhibited by some in response to the terrorist attacks nearly ten years ago. It really does seem crazy, in the sense of being removed from reality, that such people do not recognise the gulf between those who laud the killing of innocents, and those who celebrate the demise of an unrepentant mass murderer.

Zac Alstin works at the Southern Cross Bioethics Institute in Adelaide, South Australia.

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