“While we may have killed bin Laden the man, bin Laden the idea lives on.” Indeed — the jihad continues, as it did for centuries before bin Laden was born. “Will Bin Laden’s Specter Still Hover Over American Life?,” by Avi Davis in The American Thinker, May 2:
[…] In the end, all most Americans knew about this perfervid ascetic was that he was single-mindedly committed to our destruction and that we had better get rid of him before he got rid of us. Yet many failed to comprehend that the jihad bin Laden pronounced was not simply the expression of one man’s vendetta, but instead the spearhead of a virulent anti-Western contagion that had gripped much of the Islamic world. This misconception doomed us, over the past ten years, to simplistic associations of bin Laden’s mission with just one man, when in fact it increasingly became the statement of an entire civilization.
The result is that while we may have killed bin Laden the man, bin Laden the idea lives on. If we allow his ghost to now dominate our thinking about the nature of Jihad and Islamic fundamentalism, we will grant him a posthumous victory that will continue to paralyze our attempts to confront the greatest single challenge to the survival of Western civilization.