The death of Osama bin Laden and the social media fallout.

Wow. It's really been that long since I blogged?

So, Osama bin Laden is dead. I heard this about 2pm on Sunday Monday afternoon (the public holiday confused me :-P) and thought I must be pretty behind the times as I'd been on a youth leadership conference for 3 days. One of the men I was travelling with got an sms from his wife saying "bin laden is dead". No other information. Of course this got us all very interested. My first assumption, for some reason, was that he'd keeled over dead from an illness or something. Probably due to the use of the word 'dead' and not 'killed'. So Zac H pulled out his laptop and phone, jumped online and within 30 seconds we knew that US forces had raided a compound where they knew Osama to be living and shot him dead.

Within 24 hours (in which time I got home and was able to get internet access myself), I read the conflicting reports of whether a Pakistani helicopter was involved in the raid (unlikely), and that Osama had been given the opportunity to hand himself over, had refused, and consequently shot. He apparently used his wife as a human shield and his son and members of his inner circle were also killed. Many americans had stayed up late to watch the President's address which would confirm the rumours they had heard. A blogger in Abbottabad had unwittingly live-tweeted the raid when he was disturbed in the early hours of the morning by the helicopters.

And of course, there have been all the reactions on Facebook and Twitter. And reactions to the reactions. It seems it is becoming the trendy Christian thing to condemn people's celebrating of Osama's death, and preferably by using this 'quote' -

‎"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that" mis-attributed to Martin Luther King Jr.

Firstly, that's not Martin Luther King Jr's quote. He did say most of it, however the first line - "I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy" - is not his. It belongs to a random on Facebook by the name of Jessica Dovey, who then went on to post the MLK Jnr quote. It's just that everyone who's reposted it since then has merged her quote and his together.

That aside, I don't think it's really applicable to this scenario anyway. Well, Jessica's is. That's her opinion on the matter. But Martin Luther King Jnr's quote isn't, in my view. To bandy around this quote in opposition to killing Osama bin Laden suggests that his killing was motivated by hate and that, somehow, love might have fixed the situation instead. As much as I agree love is generally the answer, especially in personal relationships, I don't think it's all the same in war. Unfortunately killing people is a part of war. Sometimes it is done too much. It's something we should try and avoid, if possible. And Osama was given the opportunity to surrender himself in that compound in Abbottabad. But he didn't. So he was shot. I think that sounds fair enough. He wasn't killed just because someone got mad and wanted to 'get back' at him (which I think is probably the type of attitude Martin Luther King Jnr was warning against). I don't see it as returning hate for hate. They killed Saddam Hussein too, and I think they probably would have killed Adolf Hitler too if he hadn't beat them to it. I don't recall anybody criticising the killing of Saddam Hussein, or even the subsequent celebrations, the same way they are criticising the killing of Osama or those subsequent celebrations.

Note that I'm not advocating celebrating Osama's death. I think it would have been preferable to take him alive, not even just from a moral standpoint but also a tactical one. He would have been a valuable source of information, although he probably would have killed himself first than given up information on Al Quaeda or the Taliban. I am not yet convinced one way or the other whether celebrating his death is wrong or right or neither. I would probably err on the side of wrong, because death is a consequence of sin in our world and is never good. But death is a part of war. And when it is such a guilty, important member of the opposing forces and not a lay soldier or innocent civilian, I think it is a very easily tolerable death.