It is not the spirit of revenge, neither is it savagery or primitivism that took the jubilant American crowds to the streets for Bin
Without him the world is a better place.
Laden's death. There is sense of reality, common sense, unity, and in particular the will to live. There should be no guilt or nagging thoughts about an hypothetical Western arrogance.
All this has been revealed on Capital Hill and Ground Zero, full of assertive and joyful crowds, against what is becoming hazier within a society that day in, day out, is falling prey to a sense of atonement, and is prone to justify terrorists.
This is not about compensation, it's about restitution. We - Europeans ourselves - are those young Americans who rejoice in the streets overr Bin Laden’s killing, whether we want to admit it or not, whether we are gnawed by ideological hesitations or not.
Families holdind the portraits of their killed loved ones, burnt or killed jumping out of the 30th floor; uniformed soldiers, ultimately proud of a war that the world has been questioning for ten years; the firefighters who rushed to aid the crowd; all the New Yorkers who saw the devil in that cloud of dust and death... They, all together, have celebrated a basic and simple victory, the death of a criminal, an Islamist Hitler, who wanted to turn the earth into a crater of hatred.
Without him the world is a better place.
Targeted killings occur when the terrorist can strike back when you are able to finally get him: that's why you act when you can finally do it, without losing the chance. As for Bin Laden, both conditions were appropriate after 12 years of hunting and dozens of thousands of deaths.
The atrocious essence of terrorism is the denial of all rights that have been built in for centuries of Jewish-Christian thought; it is the impossibility to gather together, to enter a public place without been searched, it is the necessity to be controlled in the airports, the danger to ride on buses, trains, subways; to hang out in bars, restaurants, markets, even offices and schools that blow up because of a obsessed shahid.
Terrorism harms every liberty. It is the grief for an immediate and unbelivable loss; it's a thousand of crippled persons; it is the global psychological shift that scares our time and our world, from Yemen to London, from Paris to Jerusalem, and Mombasa, Bali, Mumbai and New York.
Our spoiled society has never understood how all this happened; it's something beyond our own understanding. Many in the media even bought the terrorists' version of their reasons. Hamas, a committed terrorist organization, yesterday outrageously mourned Bin Laden as an "Arab holy warrior", as he is known, declaring: "The American policy is based on oppression and on shedding of Arab and Muslim blood".
The American crowds in the streets demonstrate that the US that we love, democratic and strong, from Roosevelt to Bush, is not ashamed of being right, of fighting to win. Placards reported "Obama one-Osama zero"; "This is the apocalypse, and we win". The perveted idea of building a mosque at Ground Zero left some empty space fpr the solemn "Amazing Grace" hymn. The American people know what takes to stand against evil and know that Bin Laden's killing is part of that struggle. That's the reason they celebrated.
It was not Bin Laden who invented terrorism with his Palestinian mentor Abd Allah Yussef Al Azzam. However, it was Bin Laden's strategy to bring terrorism, through Al-Qaeda, to the level of a global and mass dimension.
It was Bin Laden who randomly picked enemies everywhere around the world, of all ages, all religions including his own, in order to make them targets of a meticulous death plan.
It was Bin Laden who explained those deaths in an atonic and flat voice, with a neutral and pale expression, down an ecologic bush or a primordial stone.
Bin Laden used to write his theories of hatred in Arabic, imbued with Quranic references. No one realised that, until the great historian Bernard Lewis warned us all in 1998 to beware of this terrorist who writes openly in the newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi a declaration of war against all "Crusaders and Jews", and this means that those who do not believe to his version of Islam must be killed in his war for the world's calliphate.
Until 9/11, no one understood how dangerous Bin Laden was. Not even when people in the Arab States, celebrating his massacres, would take the streets dancing in joy and dishing out candies. We had been living in the illusion that fanatics are a tiny minority.
When Obama says that he has not waged war against Islam, he is right. But whoever among us ever did? It is Islam that attacked the West all the times: Bin Laden, Ahmadinejad, Hamas, Hizbullah and their well-funded heirs... It is Islamic terrorism which represents the great, arrogant and fierce enemy that we all must fight.
And now that the US scored 1-0, Europe must take good care not to turn this match into a draw. %ad%