“Don’t cry for Awlaki,” Will tells us. “He got what he deserved. He left this country to wage war against it. Instead of risking his own life, he sent others to do his dirty work. Through Internet videos, email correspondence, and personal appeals, he inspired and incited the Fort Hood shooter, the underwear bomber, and the Times Square bomber. From thousands of miles away, he pulled their strings. They were his human drones.”
Well, if one paragraph of unsourced innuendo, evasion, exaggeration, and deceit isn’t enough to condemn a man to death without allowing him one word in his own defense, I don’t know what is. And, if we happen to kill half a dozen innocent bystanders while we’re at it, well, maybe if you didn’t stand next to people who talk trash about the United States you wouldn’t get dead! Did you ever think about that?
Meanwhile, Christopher Hitchens, who once purported to channel George Orwell but now seems to have switched to Dick Cheney, announces theatrically that “Those who protest the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki have to say what they would have done instead.” Well, Chris, I would do the same thing that Great Britain did to you when you left your “mother country” to participate in a training camp in a terrorist state (Castro’s Cuba). I would have done nothing.
Someday, I like to think, we will waken from this hysteria, and, like the good Christians of Salem, realize that the witches and warlocks we have been consigning to the flames were flesh and blood people, and not the evil totems of our imagination. Who could have guessed, only eleven short years ago, that human sacrifice would become a 21st-Century institution? I guess evil does exist.
Afterwords
For those of us who admired Hitchens’ writings on Orwell, his column is particularly unattractive. Thoughtcrimes are real, and must be punished by death! Really, Chris? Is that what George would have said?
Earlier, Will went, well, ballistic over the prospect of terrorists raining death and destruction from the skies via model airplanes, swallowing hook, line, and sinker another total bullshit story from the annals of the FBI. For those who want it, Glenn Greenwald (as usual) has the antidote for this moral hydrophobia here and here. You need to read Glenn, because the dogs are definitely biting these days.
