A manner of justice was served to a particularly odious terrorist in a upscale city in Pakistan early Monday morning local time. He will have no name in this blog, because his identity is known and he does not deserve a memorial of a Google search even to this remote, back- water blog. He found his termination as a deliverer of death at the hands of the country to whom his inflated position as a dark angel of indiscriminate terror had been etched by the inane savagery of thousands of innocent deaths on the morning of September 11th, 2001. The end was swift and sure; but it could not remotely equal the sustained horror of those trapped behind smoking floors of a soon to collapse skyscraper, the crushing agony of those who had to sit helpless as maniacal puppets of this terrorist drove planes into catastrophic impacts, and not even a wisp of the piercing pain that any mother of any slain soldier assassinated by a remote directed explosive must have felt when told the news of her beloved child’s end defending the very people this societal lynch artist claimed to represent.
Who was this individual who became one of the most hunted figures in history? In final essence, he was a cartoon character of a man. A rich man who sold himself as some bizarre representative of the downtrodden. A faux religious character who pretended to live a life mirroring his prophet , when his personal own true religion was a sadistic worship of nihilism. A classic mass murder who hid behind a strategy of “mass casualty” as a cleaned up description of his need to kill the innocent in droves. A man proselytizing about the “foreign devil”, when he personally was responsible for more deaths among his own race and religion than any foreign influence or action could ever achieve.
The full circle took ten years and it ended as suddenly and as swiftly as it began, from the air in ships, striking the seemingly impregnable, and laying waste in just minutes. The lessons will potentially take many more years to fully discern, but a frontier justice to deal with the truly wicked has found a 21st century role. There is no place in a modern civilized society for an evil that hides behind its projection of fear, that works toward the creation of a racialist, segregationist false choice between individual freedom and 7th century religious fervor and societal tenets. In the end the spark that this nihilist had ignited ended up with an arab world rising up not for a modern Caliph, but with this spring, a birth of potential freedom from tyranny. Through his own destruction, the faint candle that he tried over so many years to snuff out, may finally be in a position to illuminate. The ultimate irony. The ultimate epitaph.
Now that’s justice…