Millions of blissful Americans took to the streets when President Obama announced last May that the Seal Team 6 had located and killed Osama bin Laden.Oh dear. What a muddled man. And what a muddled woman. And what distasteful moral equivalence they both engage in. Since when is triumph over repugnant evil wrong and not worthy of celebration? It may depend on the situation, but celebrating victory over loathsome evils like bin Laden is not wrong. On the other hand, what about whenever the terrorists celebrate? That's what should be considered offensive, and that's what perpetuates the violence cycle.
People rallied, cheered, and waved their flags with such gusto that they looked as blood-hungry as bin Laden and his al Qaeda cadre. Now those people can buy a graphic novel commemorating the assassination. How crude.
Comic company IDW Publishing hopes to capitalize on these people’s schadenfreude-fueled joy by releasing a graphic novel about the top secret mission. [...]
IDW, which also publishes comic adaptations of big-name franchises, including ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,’ ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘Transformers,’ thus reawakens the questions we were forced to address immediately following bin Laden’s death.
Was justice done? Is swooping in to shoot a man, no matter how nefarious and loathed, worthy of celebration? Or worse, consumerism?
I would personally say that Tel Aviv-based journalist Mya Guarnieri got it right when she wrote, “A death of a human being should never be celebrated — whether that person was an innocent or whether he or she is guilty of an unspeakable crime. Bloodshed, and rejoicing in it, only perpetuates the cycle of violence.”
And the writer Belonsky links to at the Huffpo says something more pretty ludicrous herself:
It's been particularly troubling to me, an American-Israeli, to watch these events unfold from Tel Aviv. I've heard too many Israelis justify the occupation of Palestinian territory with statements like, "They're animals, they celebrate when we're killed." I've heard the same rhetoric come from American mouths, "The Muslim world cheered after the 9/11 attacks."So that's her little game, and Belonsky's too by extension: they're actually trying to exploit this news all for the sake of attacking the battle against terrorists out to murder innocents, not because death of monsters may still not be worth celebrating afterwards. And she's also trying to perpetuate the lie that there was ever a "palestinian country", refusing to recognize that Judea/Samaria and Gaza are Jewish land by origin.
Americans -- many of whom consider their so-called War on Terror morally righteous -- must ask themselves if the images of their celebrations really look so different than those that they condemn.
By the logic they go by, even non-fiction books without pictures about the raid in Pakistan could be considered wrongful consumerism. Even special books for education could be considered the same. All they're really trying to do is attack the right to inform people about the state of the world.
And the second propagandist really did a good job signaling her anti-Americanism there! Then again, so did Belonsky. One can only wonder if they also dislike the Purim holiday, which was created to celebrate the Jewish people's triumph over a monster who would seek our annihilation in ancient Persia.
After reading this crapola, I'm more looking forward than ever to checking out IDW's new graphic novel, and I thank Dale & Julia Dye for their contributions to the project.
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