Rant on.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
For those who are living in the dark and yet somehow reading my obscure little blog, Osama bin Laden is dead<\/a>.\u00a0 As announced by President Obama<\/a>, ten years of searching for the Al-Qaeda terrorist leader culminated in intelligence which found him in a military compound in Pakistan.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I don’t like saying it, but I am glad this man has been killed.\u00a0 I am not a big fan of anyone’s death, but there are exceptions to every rule.\u00a0 Osama and his terrorist organization were responsible for the 9\/11 attacks among countless other operations against civilian targets.\u00a0 Al-Qaeda has suffered a serious blow with his death, and many are hoping it is a death blow.\u00a0 I doubt that it is, but we can hope that without bin Laden the group falls apart.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There are a couple of important aspects to this situation which I think people are either going to overlook or put the wrong emphasis on.\u00a0 The first is to think of this as an attack or strike against the Islam religion.\u00a0 This is not the case.\u00a0 Osama was<\/em> a Muslim, but he did not represent it.\u00a0 His faction was a radical part of it, much like the Westboro Baptist Church is a radical part of Christianity.\u00a0 True, the latter has not committed acts of terrorism, but they have otherwise been just as hateful as bin Laden’s lot in their own way.\u00a0 The point is, neither Osama does not represent the whole of the Islamic faith anymore than Rev. Phelps represents the whole of Christianity.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Along a similar line is bin Laden’s burial at sea within a day of his death.\u00a0 This was done in accordance with his religious beliefs.\u00a0 I fear many people will be angry at this, that he was accorded any respect in death, much less a Muslim tradition.\u00a0 Too many people still unfairly associate that religion with terrorism.\u00a0 Muslims, as a whole and in general, do not support terrorist acts.\u00a0 Christians, as a whole and in general, are not hateful people.\u00a0 There are exceptions to both of these statements, and they seem to get the most press.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n President Obama was careful to make note of this, pointing out how Osama killed quite a few Muslims in his reign of terror.\u00a0 Bin Laden was an indiscriminate murderer.\u00a0 He saw to the deaths of citizens whose country provided him with safe harbor.\u00a0 He was found in Pakistan, and many Pakistanis died at his orders.\u00a0 Pakistan’s government, as I understand it, did help in locating bin Laden, so while that country did hide him for awhile, they also ultimately rooted him out for U.S. military forces.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So the bad man is dead.\u00a0 It is not the end of bad men; there are plenty left in the world.\u00a0 It’s not even the end of Al-Qaeda, I suspect.\u00a0 That organization still has plenty of members and a few leaders ready to continue Osama’s murderous job.\u00a0 His death is<\/em> a significant blow, and hopefully it rings a death knell for the organization at large.\u00a0 Thank you, President Obama, for making the difficult decision to act upon the intelligence you received and order bin Laden’s death.\u00a0 And thank you for vowing to keep up the good fight.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Rant off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rant on. For those who are living in the dark and yet somehow reading my obscure little blog, Osama bin Laden is dead.\u00a0 As announced by President Obama, ten years of searching for the Al-Qaeda terrorist leader culminated in intelligence which found him in a military compound in Pakistan. I don’t like saying […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=474"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":475,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474\/revisions\/475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}