Hey, I’m glad he’s dead. I know, I know, we’re not supposed to celebrate anyone’s death. In fact, it wasn’t even a full day after the news of Bin Laden’s death that I had to hear from presumptuous moral-equivalence preaching factions amongst media and social networks about how embarrassed they are to see any fellow Americans show any joy or positive emotion over the death of the murderer of 3,000 Americans (not to mention the the October 12, 2002, Bali bombings, or the March 11, 2004, Madrid bombings, or the July 7, 2005, London bombings, and so on).

The hand-wringer’s code word instead became “relief.” You are only allowed to express “relief” that OBL is dead, not happiness, you see, because in the second-grade logic of the moral equivilist expressing any joy over a terrorist’s death makes us no different than the terrorists, or at least no different than, say, the Palestinians caught on tape celebrating the murder of 3,000 civilians on 9-11. See: “Cycle of violence” and all of that nonsensical garbage, as though defending oneself is the same as trying to push a lawful and recognized nation of peoples into the sea.

Faster than you can say “Bleeding-heart, context-lacking UN lover” a supposed quote from Martin Luther King popped up all over the social media Internet, claiming, “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.” Just one problem — MLK never said that. Facts? No matter. A five-minute Google search won’t stop the moral equivilist locomotive once it gets going. And the speed at which it propagated — faster than any false narrative that National Security Adviser John Brennen could even muster! — underscored its fabricated intentions.

Sure, maybe the quote captures the spirit of MLK’s thinking, and many are saying it’s not such a stretch or no different than, say, the MLK quote that “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.” Well, there’s a time for MLK’s thinking, and there’s a time for the Navy SEAL instead. You either get that or you don’t. As for me, I like to think that the last light Osama saw was the muzzle flash from a Navy SEAL’s Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying to abandon moderation. I’m not saying there wouldn’t be cases in which an expression could become pornographic, embarrassing or extreme. Albeit, chanting “U-S-A” is more appropriate at an Olympic event than for the death of a murdermarytr-preaching terrorist. Lack of couth aside — and from what I’ve seen such celebrations were mostly from college youths who were 10 years ago too young to understand how our world forever changed — if you take joy in Bin Laden’s death, don’t be cowed into shame. It doesn’t make you a monster, or the same as the terrorist, or someone with blood lust, or even less enlightened than the self-righteously moral equivilists claim themselves to be. And, certainly, OBL’s death may not change much operationally (and yet, never underestimate the loss of a leader — they are not often easily replaced).

Likewise, if you’re sad over his death — because the loss of life and recollections of dark times, etc. — I will respect that too, but don’t hold yourself somehow superior to those feeling in a more elated mood.

And while we’re at it, it’s also perfectly acceptable to be happy for the circumstances of the mission. It’s okay to be okay that Bin Laden may not have had a firearm, and may not have used women as a human shields. Maybe it would have lightened the heavy conscious of the hand-wringer, but it changes nothing.

It’s also perfectly natural to want to see the photographic evidence of Bin Laden. True, a lack thereof does not make a conspiracy — the nuts are nuts and weave their logic accordingly. All the more reason one rationale of the Administration — that they had a DNA match and thus needed no photograph for proof — was truly ridiculous. We’re talking about an Arab street that believes that Jews were told to stay home on 9/11, and a Truther fringe that thinks federal agents somehow secretly and quietly planted explosives in the twin towers. Do you really think they’re going to accept, “Trust us, we have DNA evidence?” No, the reasons for the evidence are many, and include less tangible things as affirming to terrorists how bipartisianly serious and persistent we remain in hunting them and crushing their morale, historical record, and for some, just plain closure.

Indeed, it’s not just the president or liberal Democrats who would have us all take a quaalude. Here’s the epitome of knuckle-headed moral equivalence from Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers: “Imagine how the American people would react if Al Qaeda killed one of our troops or military leaders, and put photos of the body on the Internet.” Did Chairman Rogers really compare al Qaeda terrorists and self-ordained Islamic rulers to our professional soldiers and duly-elected representatives? Isn’t it great how Chairman Rogers can see the photos but the constituents paying his salary cannot? Can we get a little less lecture with your hypocrisy, Congressman?

But most of all, one should be overjoyed with U.S. military forces, the guys and gals who keep us safe.

You see, that Navy Seal is the same guy who hasn’t seen his family in 10 months, who routinely humps about a 50-pound rucksack across the mountains of Afghanistan, the deserts of Iraq and other armpits of the planet while our hand-wringing moral equivilists shake fingers and tut-tut with one another in their virtual chat rooms and otherwise second-guess and draw comparisons between our accountable military forces versus unaccountable, non-state sanctioned, illegal-combatant terrorists who highjack passenger planes for guided missiles.

Like I said, you either get the difference, or you don’t.

Solid points by Eugene Robinson, a rare occasion we’re in agreement:

Why? Because while gory photographs would have inflamed some jihadists and wannabes, I believe they would have disillusioned and deflated others. A heroic myth of invulnerability had been built around bin Laden. He was supposed to have cheated death while fighting the Russians in Afghanistan, walking tall through fields of fire as the bullets somehow missed. He escaped the Americans who cornered him at Tora Bora. He evaded capture for a decade, despite the best efforts of the West’s spies and soldiers.

Showing him in death would definitively refute any notion that bin Laden enjoyed some kind of divine protection. The myth would die with the man.

It’s also true that photographic evidence would silence most, but not all, of the conspiracy theorists (who are surely putting on their tinfoil hats as we speak). But this is just a secondary consideration, because the wing nuts won’t get any traction. I doubt that even Donald Trump is going to endorse a theory that requires calling Navy SEALs a bunch of bald-faced liars — not to mention the entire military and intelligence chains of command.

The reason to display the photos is to show bin Laden for what he really was: not a holy warrior, not a holy anything, but a deluded mass murderer who met the end he so richly deserved.

Great tongue-in-cheek post by IowaHawk. Read the whole thing:

Who is to credit for this rebirth in American national unity? First and foremost, we must cite the leadership of President Obama. Like many Americans – and the Nobel Peace Prize committee – I naively feared he was actually serious when he initially proposed shutting down Guantanamo, trying detainees in American civilian courts, and prior consultation with the international community. Little did I know that this untested young Commander-in-Chief would muster the courage to read his weekly Gallup numbers and, in one daring unilateral extra-judicial targeted hit job, toss aside every single idiotic foreign policy principle of his election campaign. Perhaps most satisfyingly, it was a mission made possible thanks to information extracted by methods he previously banned as “illegal torture.”

But this triumphant new era in situationally-unified American bloodlust does not belong to the President alone; we must also cite Congress’s born-again waterboarders like Nancy Pelosi and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and their newfound enthusiasm for what (at least until 9pm Sunday) they would have once considered illegal military murder squads. Neither can we forget the watchdogs of America’s press, who have shown unprecedented ethical flexibility in shedding their long-held Gandhi moralism and embracing their inner Rambo.

Hey, was this part of the War on Terror, or just Overseas Contingency Operations?

Ha! I’m laughing at the su-perior liberal rationale! Seems we’re all a bunch of targeted-assassination lovers these days.

Here’s Alan Dershowitz on why President Obama made a mistake in both burying Osama Bin Laden at sea and then not releasing the photographic evidence.

In my nearly half-century of representing defendants charged with homicide, I have come to know that the best evidence of how a person died comes from the body of the deceased. Dead bodies often talk more loudly, clearly and unambiguously than live witnesses. Bin Laden’s body should have been preserved as long as necessary to gather all relevant evidence, notwithstanding the requirements of Shariah Law.

When a Muslim or a Jew is the victim of a homicide in the United States, religious considerations do not trump civil requirements. Their bodies are generally sent to the medical examiner for thorough examination. Notwithstanding religious prohibitions, autopsies are performed and organs removed for testing. No special exception should have been made for bin Laden’s body.

The president’s decision to suppress the remaining photographic evidence is disturbing on many levels. First, it is wrong on its merits. The public is used to seeing visual portrayals of dead bodies on television and in movies. Anyone who has served as a juror or a courtroom observer in a homicide case has seen bodies riddled with bullets or afflicted with stab wounds. We are mature enough to endure viewing such visual evidence if we choose to. Nor is there any real risk that these photographs will inflame Muslim or Arab sensibilities any more than the photographs of Saddam Hussein did.

In a democracy, doubts must always be resolved in favor of disclosure, particularly in a matter of such great public interest and controversy. Surely Congress has at least equal authority to decide what to do with the photographs. Moreover, the press may have the right to obtain and publish these highly relevant items of evidence as part of its duty to inform the public. Some media will surely challenge the president’s decision—and if they do I hope they win.

The great Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis taught us nearly a century ago that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” The remaining evidence of how bin Laden was killed—the photographs and the results of any forensic tests that may have been hastily performed—should be exposed to the sunlight of publication.

Add to that the hypocrisy of the decision by its defenders, whether in public office or private enterprise such as the media. President Obama recently lifted the ban on photographs of U.S. servicemen and women coffins — does that not incite? The Supreme Court recently backed the “right” of the Westboro Baptist’s funeral protests — certainly that incites! Or what of the charred remains of American contractors in Iraq a few years back, or photos of Abu Ghraib — apparently back then it was just fine to incite the Arab world and the easily disturbed American conscience.

[NY Times] WASHINGTON — President Obama delivered a strong defense on Friday night of a proposed Muslim community center and mosque near ground zero in Manhattan, using a White House dinner celebrating Ramadan to proclaim that “as a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country.”

As usual, the great “uniter” in chief, misses the point. One cannot throw a stone in downtown New York City without it hitting a church, temple or mosque, and thus nobody is arguing that Muslims have no right to practice their religion. But conversely, as recently pointed out by Charles Krauthammer, nobody is proposing we build a theme park at Gettysburg, a German cultural center at Normandy or Auschwitz, or a Japanese embassy at Pearl Harbor. Or for that matter, since there’s this whole supposed separation of church and state — but only when it’s convenient — why not build a shrine to atheism at Ground Zero?

(And as the State Department recently sent the Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf abroad as part of a taxpayer-funded government outreach program, I’m sure Obama supporters everywhere would have no problem whatsoever if the State Department sent some fire and brimstone Baptists abroad too, right? Once again, the sheer hypocrisy of the “church-state separation” Leftists never ceases to amaze me.)

NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s offer to build the mosque at any other number of locations — echoed similarly by many others — has been rebuffed, and this underscores that the objective of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has nothing to do with outreach or building bridges. He may as well be proposing to build a fountain filled with urine that can perpetually desecrate the graves of the 3,000 Americans buried there.

So, here we are then. As long as we wrap something up in the garb of “diversity” apparently anything that defies common sense or courtesy is fair game.

I wonder if the president would support the offer to — “in an effort to break down barriers and reduce deadly homophobia in the Islamic world” — build a gay Islamic bar right next to the proposed Ground Zero mosque.

The world is laughing at the Great Uniter’s lack of unifying ability. And at the rest of us as well.

First, some great recollection of history by the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, for the world’s Helen Thomases. The recently retired friend of moral equivalence and relativism, Helen Thomas, left in shame last week after a candid moment in which she explained on video how she’d promote Middle East Peace: “Tell them [Jews in Israel] to get the hell out of Palestine. … Go home. Poland. Germany. And America and everywhere else.”

Well, I don’t know about “everywhere else,” but after World War II, many Jews did attempt to “go home” to Poland. This resulted in the murder of about 1,500 of them — killed not by Nazis but by Poles, either out of sheer ethnic hatred or fear they would lose their (stolen) homes.

The mini-Holocaust that followed the Holocaust itself is not well-known anymore, but it played an outsized role in the establishment of the state of Israel. It was the plight of Jews consigned to Displaced Persons camps in Europe that both moved and outraged President Truman, who supported Jewish immigration to Palestine and, when the time came, the new state itself. Something had to be done for the Jews of Europe. They were still being murdered.

In the Polish city of Kielce, on July 4, 1946 — more than a year after the end of the war — rumors of a Jewish ritual murder triggered a pogrom in which 42 Jews were killed. All were Holocaust survivors. The Kielce murders were not, by any means, the sole example of why Jews could not “go home.” When I visited the Polish city where my mother had been born, Ostroleka, I was told of a Jew who survived Auschwitz only to be murdered when he tried to reclaim his business. In much of Eastern Europe, Jews feared for their lives.

That’s great history by Cohen.

Just one retort, however, counters Jonah Goldberg — it seems Mr. Cohen hasn’t always been intellectually honest himself:

I really liked Richard Cohen’s column today on Helen Thomas, in which he makes it sound as if he thinks Thomas is 100 percent wrong. But it’s kind of hard to square with this Cohen column from a few years ago. In his July 16, 2006, Washington Post column, Cohen wrote:

The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.

“Draw a cartoon or write a novel offending Islam, and you must go into hiding; defame Jews and earn accolades.” — Victor Davis Hanson.

“The consequence of this moral and cultural relativism is that people are increasingly unable to make moral distinctions based on behavior. Such moral equivalence rapidly mutates into moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a “victim” group while those at the receiving end of their behavior are blamed simply because they belong to the “oppressive” majority. This is on repeated display over a wide range of domestic issues such as family breakdown, drug abuse and the various demands of the “victim culture,” including the response to examples of Muslim aggression. …There is a tendency to equate and then invert the behavior of the perpetrators of violence and that of their victims, so that self-defense is misrepresented as aggression while the original violence is viewed sympathetically as understandable and even justified.” — Melanie Phillips, author of Londonistan.

Well said Victor and Melanie! Indeed, whenever the topic turns to Israel and Palestine one finds the masses of conventional “wisdom” become the harbingers of extreme irrationality.

Example number one came from Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who in the wake of activist aggression resulting in 9 dead labeled it “Turkey’s 9-11.” Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up. Sure, numb skull, it’s just like 9-11, except 3,000 or so less dead and instead of hijacked airplanes flown into buildings it was a lawful attempt to search for terrorist supplies. After all, when it comes to terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas have used Red Crescent ambulances to ferry arms and militants and international commercial shipping to deliver weapons. No other country but Israel would be expected to put up with such nonsense. But nonsense is precisely what we get from closet anti-Semites in Turkey.

Throughout Europe the typical cry that Israel acted “disproportionately” continues. It makes one wonder what the heck Europe would consider “proportionate.” This is the same world community that, as Victor Hanson above retorts, said virtually nothing when North Korea sunk a South Korean ship (an act of war) a few weeks ago, or when Russia put its boot on the neck of Grozny, or nowhere near “the scale of violence, given what we see hourly in Pakistan, Darfur, and the Congo.”

How’s this for proportionate:

Israel (foolishly) withdrew from Gaza years ago, ceding control to Hamas, which proceeded to launch thousands of rockets into Israel. Israel then enacted this blockade for self defense, simultaneously pitying the residents of Gaza from their elected terrorist leaders by delivering food and supplies, “including [from just January to March alone] 48,000 tons of food products; 40,000 tons of wheat; 2,760 tons of rice; 1,987 tons of clothes and footwear; and 553 tons of milk powder and baby food” to the very Palestinians trying to kill them and destroy their state.

As columnist Mona Charen reminded, Israel (1) asked the flotilla organizers to deliver to a predetermined port first for inspection, but were refused, (2) ignored Israeli Navy requests to change course, (3) and boarded with only the minimally-defensive weaponry, including a single pistol for each soldier, the primary weapon being a paintball gun. In return (4) the “activists,” which included members of a group with known ties to Hamas and other global jihad terrorist groups, and who seemed fully prepared and preordained for violence and martyrdom, complete with chanted references to a massacre of Jews in Arabia by Muhammad, (5) began to beat the Israelis with metal rods, knifes, tossed stun grenades, and possibly fired guns.

Were it not obvious enough that the intentions had nothing to do with “relief” for Palestinians, today (6) refused the supplies Israel detained from the blockade, our NATO “ally” Turkey appears to have officially sealed a “strategic alliance between Turkey, Iran, and Syria,” notably detailed by Seth Cropsey. There’s a reason why Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan told his parliament that “today is a turning point in history. Nothing will ever be the same again.” (7) This wasn’t a reaction by Turkey to Israel, it was a proactive decision. Their plan was to provoke a response, and that’s exactly what they got.

One day, however, Turkey might wish it hadn’t made a deal with the devil in Iran.

Every once in a while the pride and arrogant sense of certitude overcomes the well-scripted and politically correct intellectual. In this case it was a “moderate” Islamic follower, a member of University of California at San Diego (UCSD) Muslim Student Association (MSA) who abandoned her carefully crafted code words like “occupation” and “resistance” in favor of all out hateful genocide.

If the video below surprises you, it shouldn’t. There’s more where she came from:

“For it.”

Where’s the outrage? The protests of the UCSD MSA and Ms. Jumanah Imad Albahri? The media saturation?

Jonah Goldberg comments:

I asked UCSD, via e-mail, whether the woman in question was censured in any way for endorsing bigotry and genocide, or if the video was somehow misleading. In response, I received boilerplate about how, in the tradition of Aristotle, UCSD treasures “discourse and debate” and how “the very foundations of every great university are set upon the rock-solid principles of freedom of thought and freedom of speech.”

I wrote back, in part: “Thank you for your response. I must say I find it fairly non-responsive. Out of curiosity, if a UCSD student publicly called for the extermination of gays and blacks, would this be your only response as well?”

I then received an even less responsive primer on how student groups are funded on campus.

Now, I could write at length about UCSD’s hypocrisy. After all, the school recently launched a “Battle Hate” campaign in response to some idiotic stunt called the “Compton Cookout” at which a fraternity held a racially offensive event off campus during Black History Month. Administrators went into overdrive, the Black Student Union issued 32 demands, the vice chancellor righteously explained to students that although the event may have been beyond the school’s “legal jurisdiction,” it was not beyond UCSD’s “moral jurisdiction.”

“We have the moral high ground!” she shouted before trying to start a chant of “Not in our community!”

Well, Albahri’s statements were not only within the UCSD community, they were well inside the school’s legal and moral jurisdiction. And yet in response, we don’t get the familiar kabuki of official outrage. Instead we get: This endorsement of genocide is brought to you by Aristotle.

The important point here isn’t the school’s double standard. It’s that on campuses, and in the wider intellectual culture, people can’t let go of their dog-eared script. It’s not that conventional racism is no longer a problem, nor is it that the civil rights era no longer resonates. But freaking out over the vestiges of familiar racism is firmly within the comfort zone of contemporary liberalism. Indeed, it’s an industry. Yet when it comes to students like Albahri — and there are many like her — administrators become brainless and lost. Lacking an adequate script, they resort to bromides about Aristotle.

Off campus, liberals crave a comfortable plot in which bigoted “homegrown” white men are the villains while Muslims are scapegoats. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was willing to bet that the Times Square bomber might turn out to be an opponent of healthcare reform.

What’s the right script? Honestly, I don’t know. But those perched atop the moral high ground will have to climb down to find the facts before they can write it.

This is astounding… creepy too.

[Mark Steyn] Last week, the American Association of Pediatricians [AAP] noted that certain, ahem, “immigrant communities” were shipping their daughters overseas to undergo “female genital mutilation.” So, in a spirit of multicultural compromise, they decided to amend their previous opposition to the practice: They’re not (for the moment) advocating full-scale clitoridectomies, but they are suggesting federal and state laws be changed to permit them to give a “ritual nick” to young girls.

A few years back, I thought even fainthearted Western liberals might draw the line at “FGM.” After all, it’s a key pillar of institutional misogyny in Islam: Its entire purpose is to deny women sexual pleasure. True, many of us hapless Western men find we deny women sexual pleasure without even trying, but we don’t demand genital mutilation to guarantee it. On such slender distinctions does civilization rest.

Der Spiegel, an impeccably liberal magazine, summed up the remorseless Islamization of Europe in a recent headline: “How Much Allah Can the Old Continent Bear?” Well, what’s wrong with a little Allah-lite? The AAP thinks you can hop on the sharia express and only ride a couple of stops. In such ostensibly minor concessions, the “ritual nick” we’re performing is on ourselves. Further cuts will follow.

To say that this is multiculturalism and diversity tolerance run amuck is to give the word amok a bad name. If this is the recommendation of  pediatricians then one may as well go back to seeing one’s barber for surgery. Pass the leaches. The apologists make the false comparison to circumcision, but while religiously traditional it’s not a sexual control.

Steyn is right. If we can’t draw the line here we may as well start paying our jizya “protection money” as dhimmis. If you don’t know what that is yet, don’t bother Googling it, for we may learn the hard way in our lifetime.

Here’s Mark Steyn:

As for the idea that America has become fanatically “Islamophobic” since 9/11, au contraire: Were America even mildly “Islamophobic,” it would have curtailed Muslim immigration, or at least subjected immigrants from Pakistan, Yemen, and a handful of other hotbeds to an additional level of screening. Instead, Muslim immigration to the West has accelerated in the last nine years, and, as the case of Faisal Shahzad demonstrates, being investigated by terrorism task forces is no obstacle to breezing through your U.S. citizenship application. An “Islamophobic” America might have pondered whether the more extreme elements of self-segregation were compatible with participation in a pluralist society: Instead, President Obama makes fawning speeches boasting that he supports the rights of women to be “covered” — rather than the rights of the ever lengthening numbers of European and North American Muslim women beaten, brutalized, and murdered for not wanting to be covered. America is so un-Islamophobic that at Ground Zero they’re building a 13-story mosque — on the site of an old Burlington Coat Factory damaged by airplane debris that Tuesday morning.