The End of Osama Bin Laden

Osama Bin Laden died on May 1, 2011, shot twice by a U.S. Navy SEAL at his hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan. This is the way we all expected his end would come, avenged by crack American special ops forces. One thing that particularly gratifies me is the timing of Bin Laden's demise, for he lived just long enough to see proof of the failure and futility of his life's work.

Like most fanatics, the al-Qaeda founder's ideology and appeal were built on intolerance and hatred. In his case, this meant intolerance of any deviation from his medieval views on religion and society and hatred of all who failed to share those views.

If the Muslim world had problems they were the result of scapegoats and bogeymen, especially Westerners in general and Americans in particular. Just how the indiscriminate murder of these imagined enemies would in any way improve the lives of Muslim people was never fully explained or even thought through. But then it never is, any more than Hitler's hatred of Jews, Stalin's paranoia of kulaks or Ottoman antipathy to Armenians made any rational sense. It was about focusing disaffection on the other, the outsider, to create unity in fear and fellowship in service to the sinister.

This spring Bin Laden must have watched in dejection as a wave of revolution spread across the Middle East. Revolution was what he was always fomenting, but these popular upheavals for freedom, rights and democracy appealed to hope, not fear. Unlike his vision, they embraced the future, not a barbaric past of whippings, beheadings and inhuman subjugation of women.

And unlike his record of carnage and destruction, these movements were actually about building
something. Marchers throughout the Muslim world were demonstrating people power in the service of uplifting the human spirit rather than chaining it, following in the footsteps of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, rejecting Bin Laden's path of chaos and blood. He lived just long enough to see his message eclipsed, his means repudiated and his ethos supplanted.

Troopers entered his bedroom and the criminal's final scene unfolded. But by then the plot had been completed. Whether he realized it or not, time had passed him by. He had already become what men like him despise most: Osama Bin Laden had become irrelevant.