Osama, dead at last

So last night was one of those nights that we will all remember forever. I was in bed reading when an alert popped up from one of my news apps informing me of the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed. I then switched from reading Wil Wheaton’s The Day After and other stories, to the Al Jazeera app—because most American news organizations suck—on my iPad. I then opened of Twitter to see what everybody had to say. It was a pretty memorable hour of news without ever turning the TV on.

Then in the morning I head he was buried at sea already, so I checked out on Wikipedia what Islamic law would have thought of that, and it seemed they did the right thing. Islam prefers burial on land, but in cases where the body might be dug up and mutilated, burial at sea is fine. They also did it within 24 hours which is also what Islam prefers. Why do I care? I think everybody should be treated with respect after their death. I don’t care how evil he was, he is still a human being and deserves to be treated how his religion would treat him.

All the people happy and cheering gave me a funny feeling. How can someone cheer for the death of a human being? Sure, he was an evil evil man, and deserved everything he got, but he was still a human being. He was still someone’s son, and someone’s father. I was glad they caught him and finally put a closure to at least part of the war, but I wasn’t cheering for his death at all.

Then I heard they were debating about releasing the photos of the dead body. I don’t know how I feel about this. Releasing photos of the dead body doesn’t sound very respectful. Sure we actually saw the hanging of Saddam Hussein, but that wasn’t us. That’s kind of what they do in the Middle East. I really don’t care either way if they release the photos or not. Some people might say it will quiet the people that will doubt the actual death of Osama, but I don’t think it would help. There will still be conspiracy nuts that won’t believe the the death even with actual pictures. Showing facts to people who ignore facts doesn’t really do anything.

Lets just hope this can be the beginning of the end of these stupid wars, and we can start bringing our troops back, that would be a huge help at getting our debit under control.