Oliver Willis calls out some of the whining about the celebratory reaction to the killing of Bin Laden.
This is the man directly responsible for the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. 2,977 innocent lives were lost. In addition, Americans lost a sense of security that we’ve had, the idea that our two oceans could protect us. It wasn’t a loss of innocence, but it was something taken away from our collective psyche.
When the man directly responsible for this is killed, it is a moment to rejoice. The serially stupid David Sirota, writing in Salon, compared this to those who cheered on the September 11 terrorists (unsurprisingly, Glenn Greenwald similarly spent a whole lot of overwritten paragraphs expressing a similar sentiment). In addition to just blatantly whoring for traffic, Sirota’s moral equivalence smells to high heaven. Those people were cheering on the killing of innocent people. Sunday night, Americans were celebrating a mass murderer’s moment with justice. The two are not remotely equivalent. Not even close.
I can see the logic in Greenwald and others criticizing the allegedly ordered assassination of American-born terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki. But Osama bin Laden?
These guys are seriously digging for something to bitch about and they're on the wrong side of history.