Why can’t we just kill people quietly?

7 May 2011

Am I allowed to say this? Hell, I’m going to anyway.

Am I allowed to say this? Hell, I’m going to anyway. I’ll deny it if it ever gets me into trouble. I’ll claim The Spectator mistakenly put my byline on top of a column by somebody else. ‘Wasn’t me,’ I’ll say, when the extraordinary rendition SWAT team kicks down my door. ‘Must have been Liddle. He sounds the sort. I wrote the other one that week, maybe about the royal wedding. Nice balaclava, by the way.’

So here goes. I watched the American crowds, cheering into the night about the death of Osama bin Laden, and my first, overwhelming, involuntary reaction was to sneer. There. I’ve said it.

It wasn’t a new sort of sneer. It’s a sneer with which I’m quite familiar. The thing is, I haven’t previously found myself making it at images of Washington or Times Square. Normally it’s Jenin or Gaza. Maybe Beirut. Maybe Kabul. You get what I’m driving at, right? The men had less hair on their faces, and you could see that the women actually had faces, and hair on their heads. The chants were ‘USA! USA!’ rather than ‘Allah! Allah!’, admittedly, and nobody was firing an AK-47 into the sky, or burning a flag. But you could tell, from the vibe, that this was just because they didn’t have AK-47s, and al-Qa’eda doesn’t have a flag. It’s not a sneer I’m used to doing at us, is my point. It’s a sneer reserved for them.

I’m not proud of this. Frankly, on an intellectual level, I’d take issue with myself. 9/11 wasn’t just a televisual spectacle, I’d say. It was the biggest terrorist assault in history, with a death toll equivalent to a 7/7 once a week for a year. The US military death toll since then, staggeringly, has been two and a half times that. Iraq didn’t have anything to do with Osama bin Laden, obviously, but I do appreciate that America feels differently on a visceral level, because George W. Bush did such a good job of portraying him as a warlock.

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