Growing Up bin Laden

The sons of Osama bin Laden are bitter about the fate, the sad, humiliating, disrespectful fate of their father. Regardless of how they felt about his notoriety, his mission, his modus operandi, his responsibility in the deaths of countless people, the unrest he has fomented internationally, he was their father. They decry the lack of respect given to him by American Navy SEALs tasked by the U.S. president to confront, and to dispatch him.

They have taken the peculiar - under the circumstances - step of accusing the United States of not respecting its own human rights code, of violating their own legal principles. For their father was not armed, was not offering violent resistance, and they claim, should have been taken into custody. He should have faced a legal system, one that would place him on trial, giving him the opportunity to voice his opinion, his ideology, his raison d'etre.

He was a world figure of great repute. He was beloved by many. He was feared, and he was respected. He was emulated and he was trusted. He had authority as a leader of men. He galvanized young Muslim men to rescue Islam from the obscurity of Western neglect. Why was he not "arrested and tried in a court of law so that truth is revealed to the people of the world", they asked.

"We maintain", they wrote, "that arbitrary killing is not a solution to political problems ... justice must be seen to be done." Evidently Omar bin Laden, one of Osama bin Laden's many offspring, had publicly announced his disfavour of his father's terror mission through a memoir, Growing Up bin laden. What he and his siblings fail to appreciate is that their father has been judged.

Their father engaged enthusiastically in "arbitrary killing", brutally slaughtering Muslims as well as non-Muslims through his instructions to his followers who carried through his orders to impress upon the world the mission of al-Qaeda. That was his "political" solution. And they have failed to see also that "justice" in many parts of the world was indeed seen to be done.

For their father had the lives of thousands of innocent people staining his immaculate white clothing as he presided over Death Central in his celebrated jihad against the West that extended to his followers killing without reservation any who displeased them, committing as well to a bloody sectarian conflict as to one against the infidels and the Jews.

Their high-minded citing of "the propriety of such assassination where not only international law has been blatantly violated", but along with that the principles of innocence assumed until proven otherwise through the auspices of a fair judicial trial rings somewhat hollow given the atrocities committed at the behest and in the name of their father's viciously vile jihad.