Andrew Brown, editor of the Guardian’s Comment is free Belief section, says Osama bin Laden ‘will live on.’ It’s not surprising really. I mean his comparison of the vile Osama with the abolitionist John Brown and wonderful labour activist Joe Hill says more about him than anything else.
But of course nothing could be further from the truth.
Yes, even the vilest people may live on in some minds. There are still people celebrating Hitler, Stalin and Pinochet but that does not a Joe Hill make. Unfortunately for Andrew Brown (and thankfully for the rest of us), Osama won’t live on just because he and his pro-Islamist cohorts at the Guardian wish it to be so.
Brown quotes a folk song sung for Joe Hill: “And standing there, as big as life, and smiling with his eyes, said Joe what they could never kill went on to organise.”
What Brown doesn’t realise though is that the song is not about the likes of Osama but about the many rising up against oppression and the oppressor, including today against the Islamism Osama personifies. The unfolding revolutions in Iran and across the Middle East and North Africa clearly show the irrelevance of Islamism in people’s lives and demands.
No, Osama won’t live on, particularly not when this masss movement of humanity – a third force against both Islamic terrorism and US-led state terrorism – brings Islamism to its knees.
And its time is coming.