Saturday, May 7, 2011

Sympathy For Osama Bin Laden

With apologies to The Rolling Stones.

From (left/libertarian) Brendan O’Neill, "The rise and rise of a pity-for-Osama lobby: How did ‘I hate bin Laden and I’m glad he’s dead’ become the most shocking thing one can say in polite society?" (via Ed Driscoll):

Behind the high-falutin’ expressions of passion for justice over shoot-to-kill, much of the pity-for-Osama lobby is really concerned with expressing its moral superiority over apparently vengeful Americans. Where ‘them’ Yanks still have an attachment to nationalism and war, ‘we’ Europeans are post-nationalist, cosmopolitan, empathetic rather than vengeful, and are far more comfortable with having a man in a wig rather than a man with a gun sort out our moral and political problems.

*****

It is extraordinary, and revealing, how quickly the expression of concern about the use of American force in Pakistan became an expression of values superiority over the American people. The modern chattering classes are so utterly removed from the mass of the population, so profoundly disconnected from ‘ordinary people’ and their ‘ordinary thoughts’, that they effectively see happy Americans as a more alien and unusual thing than Osama bin Laden. Where OBL wins their empathy, American jocks receive only their bile.

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