How to celebrate the death of the mass murderer who commanded his fellow Muslims to “kill the Americans wherever you find them”

James N. writes:

Have a bin Laden martini:

Two shots and a splash.

- end of initial entry -

LA to James N.:

Nice. I posted it.

James N. replies:

At first, I thought it was too crude, unsuited for an intellectual site—but, hey, why not a bit of crude celebration?

LA replies:

First, it’s not that crude. It has a kind of old-fashioned, mid-twentieth century American flair to it.

Second, the (not too) crude has its place in the scheme of things.

LA continues:

Or, to be more responsive to your point, the (not too) crude has its place at an intellectual website.

For example, I’m sure that the late Wililiam F. Buckley in his better days would not have hesitated to publish such a reader’s remark in his section of NR. Sticking it to the enemy, with a certain joyful vigor, was part of Buckley’s style.

May 6

LA writes:

It should be remembered that bin Laden’s fatwa, “Kill the Americans wherever you find them,” was not some idea he came up with on his own. “Kill the infidels wherever you find them” is from the Koran.

The point cannot be made often enough: Modern Westerners keep thinking that when some Muslim extremist makes threatening and damning remarks about Westerners, he is stating his own opinion. This is woefully incorrect. Almost all such statements are quotations or close paraphrases of the Koran and the hadiths. The jihadists are not expressing some merely personal hatred of Americans or Westerners; they are following their religtion. They are being good Muslims.

To face this fact about Islam would mean that Islam is our adversary and must be treated as such, an unbearable thought to contemporary Westerners (though not to the Westerners of the past). So we flee from the reality by nominalistically treating each jihadist’s statement of jihad sentiments and war aims as nothing but his individual feeling, rather than as what it is, an expression of Islam.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 05, 2011 09:29 PM | Send