"All men dream: but not equally," T.E. Lawrence, the legendary Lawrence of Arabia, once wrote. "Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible." Bin Laden is indeed one of the dangerous men that Lawrence described.
-Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism
The killing of Osama Bin Laden came as a shock to me last night, but I doubt it will not be the last shocking thing that our war on terror brings. We have murdered the leader of a worldwide Islamic revolutionary movement, and I am scared of the price we will pay because of it. I am glad the world is free of a mass murderer who hungered for the death of my people, but I don't see peace in my country's near future. As I write this post loud sirens burst from vehicles tearing down the road behind me and I feel it is a foreshadowing of the year to come; I hope it is not. I took a class on global terrorism in the spring of 2009, and looked through my bookshelf this morning to find my books from that class. One I particularly like is entitled "Inside Terrorism" by Bruce Hoffman. This morning I read the chapters "Religion and Terrorism" and "Modern Terrorist Mind-set", and it was very interesting. I gleaned that unless you are working will group-cell terrorism, killing the leader doesn't crumble the organization. With religious terrorism it seems that one leader after the next has lead the cause. Mustafa Chamran, an Iranian scientist and Shiite Muslim who served as defence minister in Iran, stated" We are not fighting within the rules of the world that exists today. We reject all those rules."
Hoffman states, "The resurgence of this ancient breed of adversary, the religious terrorist, actually means that nothing less than a sea change is required in our thinking about terrorism and the policies needed to counter it. Perhaps the most sobering realization in confronting religious terrorism is that the threat -and the problems that fuel it- can never be eradicated completely. The complexity, diversity, and the often idiosyncratic characteristics of religious terrorism imply that there is no "magic bullet"-no single superior solution- that can be applied to all cases."(Hoffman, Inside Terrorism) I truly hope that the killing of Osama Bin Laden can work as a "magic bullet", but if not, I hope we can come up with creative and multidirectional tactics to keep the American people safe from those who would like to see us wiped from the earth.
Well said, Linds! It also bothers me that people are so jubilant in someone's death. Bin Laden was a terrible man, but still - glorifying his death is too similar to how the terrorists gloried in 9/11. We should be better than that as a people.
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