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The Economist's obituary for Osama bin Laden.
Topic Started: Dec 10 2012, 01:30 PM (233 Views)
uB|Quacklesnap
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http://www.economist.com/node/18648254

It's really good.

Quote:
 
Somewhere, according to one of his five wives, was a man who loved sunflowers, and eating yogurt with honey; who took his children to the beach, and let them sleep under the stars; who enjoyed the BBC World Service and would go hunting with friends each Friday, sometimes mounted, like the Prophet, on a white horse. He liked the comparison. Yet the best thing in his life, he said, was that his jihads had destroyed the myth of all-conquering superpowers.


I'm not saying he wasn't a bad guy, but this is a pretty objective article written three days after the death of a man who objectively changed the world. The point of the obituary was to portray him as a man with motivations aside from simply being an evil doer terrorist. I'm always amazed at how much more nuance and depth geopolitics has compared to the most distilled message and narrative that reaches the masses.

Here is his letter to America if you care to see his justification for his actions:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6537.htm

It's easy to like the bin Laden that criticizes the crony capitalism and utilitarianism that drives the U.S's Middle Eastern policy. It's hard to like the bin Laden that orders death sentences for women who had sex outside of marriage and non-monotheists.

Interestingly, the organizations that have depicted him as an evildoer the most, such as Fox News, simultaneously advocated viewpoints that were similar to his own.

On another note, if you take an anti-war, socially liberal, secular, social democratic stance, you are diametrically opposed to Osama bin Laden. Many experts, like the CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, have stated that al-Qaeda's ideology was driven by US actions rather than US beliefs. In his words, "they hate us for what we do, not for who we are". Unfortunately, their worldview also perceived many acts that would be seen in the West as non-aggressive in an aggressive fashion. One particularly prominent example of this is the drawings of the Prophet Mohammed that were published in Danish and French newspapers. Our own religious extremists here in the United States have a similar tendency to do so, claiming that bills giving same-sex couples the right to marry are encroaching upon their allegedly moral lifestyle. Coexistence with bin Laden and al-Qaeda is impossible--they'll tolerate us until we inadvertently do something to offend them, and then the 767s will start blowing up again.

In summary, bring on the drone strikes, but do it for tolerance, not for the Carlyle Group's mutual fund.
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