Eugene Robinson: The Death of the bin Laden Myth

The Death of the bin Laden Myth

Posted on May 12, 2011

By Eugene Robinson



Years from now, I believe, we will look back and say the elimination of Osama bin Laden changed everything. To borrow Churchill’s assessment of the Nazi defeat at El Alamein, “Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Attempted terrorist attacks in the name of fundamentalist Islam will surely continue. Most will be amateurish failures, such as the alleged plot disclosed Thursday in which two homegrown would-be jihadists—now in the custody of New York City police—ineffectually aspired to blow up a synagogue. Tragically, we are bound to see attacks by genuine terrorists as well. Some may succeed.

Still, it’s hard to overstate the significance of bin Laden’s killing. Operationally and psychologically, he defined the Age of Terror—not just for Americans and other targets of his depredations but also for the terrorists who followed his writ. With his last breath, an era died.

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For Americans, bin Laden’s death is nothing short of a liberation. With the 9/11 attacks, he not only killed thousands of people whose only crimes were to go to work, board airliners or rush to the scene of disaster as first-responders. Bin Laden also took 300 million prisoners: the rest of us.

He held hostage our foreign policy—directly or indirectly provoking two wars—and, with it, hijacked a huge chunk of the federal treasury. He goaded our leaders into stretching our military almost to the breaking point. He was the inspiration, or the excuse, for a vast expansion of the government’s power to intrude into our private lives. He changed us so that whenever we see an unattended gym bag, we don’t think “absent-mindedness,” we think “potential bomb.”

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_death_of_the_bin_laden_myth_20110512/

but it is mostly the MSM party line on OBL.

It seems to disregard many facts in coming to conclusions like "took 300 million prisoners." I did not feel like a prisoner at all for the last 10 years. The first attack on the WTC was in 1993 and OBL was not involved. OBL did not call his network "Al Qaida". They had OBL issuing tapes during US elections to try and influence the outcomes (or aid in the post election theft spin). And there is much more but basically OBL was part of a puppet show designed to scare us into giving up rights and our standard of living. The US MSM and OBL worked together on that.

The death of OBL is not the death of orchestrated fear or the role such fear plays in American politics.