Killing Bin Laden – Posing questions

Tariq Ramadan (on French Television) poses important questions regarding the death of Bin Landen. I share with him many of his reservations: how come Bin Laden was hiding near Islamabad and none knew? how come was he ‘discovered’ right now? why was he killed instead of being brought in front of a court? is it in line with our civic and humanist culture to throw a killed person’s body in the water instead of burrying him in line with his religion? why such cruelty? are western governments competing in cruelty and injustice with international terrorists?

Shouldn’t Bin Laden be brought to justice, explain to a global audience (not just a western one but also to countries which have predominantly Muslim populations) why he did what he did and how this serves the cause of Islam in his view?

After all the death of Bin Laden is truly of little significance (perhaps only symbolic) in the fight against international terrorism and in particular of interenational Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. We have known now for years – as Ramadan rightly points out and as any academic or expert in this field promptly knows – that Al Qaeda is just a lose network of organisations and smaller networks spread in different countries with no real internal structure or coordination. It is a gross exaggeration to think that Bin Laden was some kind of master mind moving the threads across this network. Perhaps by now he was mainly a symbolic figure. So the fight against international terrorism is still going. But what is more pressing and equally more important these days – and in southern Europe this is ever more acutely felt – is the struggle of people in predominantly Muslim countries to achieve a functioning democracy.