05 May 2011

Uncommon Commentary #176: It Was Mayday on May Day for the Maven of Mayhem

(Actually, it was May Day in the USA, but it was already 2 May in Abbotabad.)
It would be hypocritical to affect tears over the demise of someone like Usama bin Laden, but neither, really, should we exult over his death (or that of any other fellow human being).  Ezekiel 33:11 reads in part: "As I live, says the Lord God, I desire not the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way, and live." (This doesn't mean that it was wrong to kill UbL, who had plenty of opportunity to choose virtue over vice.  Justice is not the same as murder.)  This verse comes from the Old Testament, and therefore applied to the lost sheep of Israel, but Christianity extends the attitude to all mankind—Yes, even to Moslem terrorists.
To some degree, no doubt, the jubilation is a result of the public's having made UbL into a personification of the attacks on 11 Sept. 2001; this equation is obvious from the infantile pronouncements that have been made since Sunday, e.g., "America [sic] is back," "the curse is broken," "… rejuvenates the American [sic] psyche."  The assumption subconsciously underlying such statements apparently is that the mere fact of being "American" means that we are especially blessed by Providence, and so any catastrophe that happens here (rather than in the true Promised Land, Israel, where an act of terrorism is nearly a routine occurrence) is an aberration; in eliminating UbL we have fulfilled our vengeance for, and thereby effectively erased, a dark chapter of our history.  The mastermind of "9/11," however, was not Usama bin Laden but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has been in our custody for years; in addition to being un-Christian, therefore, the celebration is rather misdirected.
Democrats who professed indignance at the "torture" of terrorists, including the just-mentioned Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, become hypocrites by expressing joy over the killing of bin Laden (unless, as is more likely, they joined the Democratic Party because they were already hypocrites).
There's another, practical reason not to party too heartily: doing so could bolster the persecution complex that many Moslems around the world evidently have, and scandalize potential terrorists into becoming actual ones.
If what I've written already does nothing to make people sober, they ought to bear in mind that Christ told us (Matthew 24:21) that the Great Tribulation at the end of history will be worse than anything that has happened before; therefore, what took place ten years ago may pale in comparison with occurrences of the future—to judge from the way that things are going, and from prophecies by reliable sources, probably not even the distant future.
(Lastly, enthusiasm should also perhaps be suppressed by bewilderment over one of the oddities of the operation that got bin Laden: since his compound was hundreds of miles from the ocean, why was the assignment given to a Navy SEALs unit?)