The Just Death of bin Laden and the European Left’s Self-Condemnation

By David Mills Published on May 2, 2016

I’d forgotten I’d written anything about the killing till I saw an item on Facebook posted by the friend I had described in the article. My friend wrote “5 years ago tonight … Justice” above a picture of New York City firemen celebrating the death of Osama bin Laden.

Here’s the article I wrote the next day, only changed here and there, because there are lessons in the enlightened Europeans’ reaction to the death of the mass murderer we should remember.

The Liberal Political Class

When the world learned that the United States had killed Osama bin Laden, shrewd observers of the liberal political class, particularly its European chapters, knew how they were going to be talking about it. The nearly universal jubilation would be indulged for a day or two, and then the usual brows would furrow and the wise and good begin to express their concerns and worries and doubts.

Suitably qualified, of course. Everyone would concede that bin Laden was a very bad man, and had been asking for it, while finding some reason to regret that he had been killed and several reasons to criticize the United States.

Few would definitively condemn the American action, bin Laden being too obviously the enemy even for the most sentimental of liberals to excuse him, as so many still excuse the adorably roly-poly mass murderer Mao Tse Tung. But he was a Communist breaking several million eggs in order to make the new society omelet, and not a religious fundamentalist, so he’s okay. He meant well, he only wanted what good western liberals want, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, etc.

They would suggest that the United States acted too quickly, or without enough thought, or without proper consultation, or without thinking of the future, or just in that simple-minded, violent, cowboy way those simple-minded violent American cowboys always act when not restrained by European moral sensitivity. Or, and this image doesn’t contradict that one, in that big, bumbling, clumsy, childish way Americans always act when not restrained by European experience.

And they were going to be ever so disappointed in Barack Obama. Why, he’d been practically European himself, and now they find him almost … Texan.

And So It Happened

And so it happened. You could find examples everywhere. Most of these examples I’ve taken from the Irish journalist Brendan O’Neill’s article in Spiked!. These reactions, he wrote, are “fuelled by self-loathing more than justice-loving” and by “a discomfort with decisive action, a fear of what such action might lead to in the future, and a belief that people in the West should douse their emotional zeal and learn to be more meek.”

Many of the concerned, worried and doubting pointed to the young Americans chanting “U.S.A.!” in the streets, which must have seemed the perfect symbol for America’s aggressive disregard for human life and human rights. O’Neill reports: “[T]his is very much the American style but I don’t think I’ve ever felt pleased at the death of anybody,” sniffed the Labour party’s candidate for mayor of London, Ken Livingstone — recently (as I write in 2016) suspended from the party for apparently anti-Semitic statements. Not exactly a moral arbiter.”

He continues: “The United States did not do what he would have done, and he does not consider whether what he said he would have done could even have been done. “We should have captured him and put him on trial. It’s a simple point — are we gangsters or a Western democracy based on the rule of law? This undermines any commitment to democracy and trial by jury and makes Obama look like some sort of mobster.”

A Bad Kind of Unity

The American celebrations, wrote a Guardian columnist (the Guardian is like the New York Times but more so), brought “the same kind of unity that rallies around flags, dismisses dissent and disdains reflection.”

Like Livingstone, he thought the United States should have captured bin Laden and put him on trial. “[T]o suggest that ‘justice has been done’, as President Obama did on Sunday night, seems perverse. This was not justice, it was an extra-judicial execution. If you shoot a man twice in the head you do not find him guilty. You find him dead. This was revenge.”

The novelist Kishwar Desai, whose first book had recently won England’s major award for first novels, wrote in The Asian Age,

The nuanced reaction in Europe, which takes human rights very seriously, has been a little different to that in the US . . . . He may have been a murderer, a war criminal, or even an evil genius, but if other criminals are given a fair trial why was he not hauled up before an international court of justice? Was President Barack Obama’s rough justice — though put across more eruditely and logically than President George W. Bush ever managed to do — any different to that meted out by Saddam Hussein towards his enemies?

The Problem

The answer is yes, and asking the question a sign of moral idiocy. But let that go.

The problem is not the enlightened Europeans’ concern for law, assuming (as I do not) that it’s genuine. The first problem is that they used the law in a way it was only slightly applicable. No one doubted bin Laden’s guilt and no one doubted that he continued to wage war on the United States and would launch another 9/11 attack if he could. He was a clear and present danger. He was a combatant, not a criminal. He had forfeited his right to an American trial by jury when he ordered the murder of 4 or 5 thousand people.

The second problem, and the bigger one, is that they turned to the law without taking pleasure in the justice they could see had been done. Even the pacifist, and few of these people are pacifists, should understand the righteous pleasure of seeing evil punished, even though he believes it should not be punished. There is something wrong with people whose first reaction to seeing a mass murderer killed is to blame his victims.

They Got bin Laden

That Sunday evening, I was sitting in a local pub with friends when a special report appeared on one of the televisions, but not the one with the sound up. I pointed to the screen, and one of my friends said, “They got bin Laden!” He had grown up in New York and lost a cousin on 9/11, a cousin whose widow and children he sees when he gets back to the city, and for ten years had said that in hope whenever the television or radio announced breaking news.

We asked the bartender to turn up the sound, and heard the anchorman announce that Osama bin Laden had been killed in Pakistan by American forces. A cheer went up. My friend put his face in his hands for several minutes. He then walked out to call his parents. When he came back, we celebrated.

Which is something the concerned, worried and doubting, at least the European chapters of that brotherhood, apparently do not understand. “While many nations suffered from al-Qaida’s terrorism and few in the world will mourn Bin Laden’s death,” wrote the Guardian columnist, “the United States is the only place where it sparked spontaneous outpourings of raucous jubilation.”

There is, I would have thought, an obvious reason for that, like two planes flying into tall buildings in New York, not London or Paris, but he thinks there’s something wrong with us. “The patriotic impulse in American society is intense and pervasive. The kind of national fervour reserved elsewhere for occasional events like royal weddings, World Cup victories or major tragedies is a dormant reflex waiting for a trigger.”

He offers this in criticism of America, but he’s said something far more damning about Europe. If he’s right, and I have no reason to doubt him even if he’s probably exaggerated the point a little, their patriotisms must not be intense and pervasive, which is to say, hardly patriotism at all. They only get excited about ephemera like royal weddings and World Cup victories or heart-tugging events like tragedies.

Not Always So for Europe

Not, apparently, by the vanquishing of their country’s enemies and long-delayed justice being done. Not about anything that actually matters. Heaven knows we have our faults and sins, but among them is not the failure to rejoice in justice.

It was not always so for Europe, even Europe’s liberals. In the words of the concerned, worried and doubting speaks the exhausted old man whose plumbing has packed it in, who after decades of sexual conquests now prefers the more sedate pleasures of the flesh, from rare old wines to thick socks that keep his feet warm, who now preaches the virtues of chastity and the vanity of sexual indulgence as if he himself had always been the model of continence, and purses his lips censoriously when he sees the young men chasing the young women. There speaks the man near death.

Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there just speaks the man who likes to sneer at other people for doing what he himself would do in the same circumstances.

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