a review of religion and media
“In short, every place where Osama bin Laden fled had either perpetrated or tolerated world-class violations of religious freedom and other human rights.” — Leonard Leo and Don Argue at The Hill Continue Reading →
Getting the man is almost mythological.
by David Morgan
Late one night the President of the United States suddenly appears on television. In our post-9/11 world, the first guess about why is a terrorist attack. It’s too late in the evening for a planned appearance. I brace for images and bad news. But the President announces the death of Osama bin Laden. After ten years of searching, the U.S. government has found the facilitator of the attacks of September 11, and only moments ago executed him on the spot. He might have waited until morning to herald the news, but President Obama acts promptly in order to take charge of the news cycle. He dares not delay, for the Internet will spread the news around the globe, leaving the administration to appear reticent, or worse, timid. The news is capital to be spent to great effect. And the margin of time in which to do so is pressing. These are the days of immediate, global ubiquity. There is no local news. A preacher burns a copy of the Qur’an in Florida and there are riots in the cities of Afghanistan. Indeed, the top-secret helicopter assault on Bin Laden’s compound is simulcast by a local tweeter.
In breaking the news, the president spent the first moment of his remarks eliciting images, a collage of images that Americans harbor in their mind’s eye, “seared into our national memory,” as Obama put it: “hijacked planes cutting through a cloudless September sky; the Twin Towers collapsing to the ground; black smoke billowing up from the Pentagon; the wreckage of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.” We walk about with a common archive in our heads, placed there by the public artifacts of modern life. Continue Reading →
I am embarassed to admit this (really quite embarrassed) but I learned about Osama Bin laden’s assasination from Paris Hilton. I fell asleep at 10 pm on Sunday night and when I woke up in the morning I rolled over and opened my Twitter feed. There it was:
@ParisHilton: Just landed back in LA, so happy to hear the news of Osama bin Laden’s death. He was the face of terrorism and such .
Are you horrified yet? I have an excuse. As a celebrity journalist I’m allowed to have Paris Hilton on my Twitter feed. Lindsay Lohan and Kim Kardashian too, who also weighed in on the death of OBL.
@LindsayLohan: Go USA
@KimKardashian: Osama Bin Laden is dead!!! I can’t wait to hear President Obama’s announcement!!! Continue Reading →
I am embarassed to admit this (really quite embarrassed) but I learned about Osama Bin laden’s assasination from Paris Hilton. I fell asleep at 10 pm on Sunday night and when I woke up in the morning I rolled over and opened my Twitter feed. There it was:
@ParisHilton: Just landed back in LA, so happy to hear the news of Osama bin Laden’s death. He was the face of terrorism and such .
Are you horrified yet? I have an excuse. As a celebrity journalist I’m allowed to have Paris Hilton on my Twitter feed. Lindsay Lohan and Kim Kardashian too, who also weighed in on the death of OBL.
@LindsayLohan: Go USA
@KimKardashian: Osama Bin Laden is dead!!! I can’t wait to hear President Obama’s announcement!!! Continue Reading →
From Matthieu Aikins at Foreign Policy Magazine:
Indeed, the Global War on Terror has illustrated the troubling contradictions that underpin our age: That the West’s attractions of modernity, material progress, and liberalism can prove unsatisfying to smart and ambitious young men; that our allies in the Muslim world might be among the greatest sources of the terrorists who would do us harm; that the freedom promised by an age of unlimited connection across information and physical space might engender a draconian self-repression; and that a new golden age of capitalism might leave such ruined states and peoples on its margins. Today, we find the roots of terror in the growing instability of the world’s economy and climate, which in turn prefigures deeper coming threats to the global order. The perverse irony of the War on Terror is how badly it is has distracted our political and moral will from the great challenges of our time. This is bin Laden’s legacy.
On this day after the announcement that Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. Navy Seals, we collect reactions from religion scholars and journalists, including Jeremy Walton, Noah Jaffe Silverman and Brigitte Sion.
Late last night, on a return flight from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion biannual meetings, I was stirred from my sleep by an announcement from the cockpit: “Some uplifting political news—we’ve just learned that Osama bin Laden has been killed. It’s a great day to be an American.” Continue Reading →
Typing this, I hesitate. Is this a mere death? An assassination? A murder? And if not the latter, why not? Mass murderers and perpetrators of genocide have been brought to trial, yet the U.S. now abandons established paths of justice. They’ve “taken him out.” Have we already tried bin Laden in our media, determined him guilty beyond doubt, not worthy of justice except the justice that we see in death? Continue Reading →
For Those About to Rock Billboard: GOP would rather you did not rock the vote, thank you very much. Bush/Cheney evidently prefer punk: Ohio GOP poll challengers slam the vote. Continue Reading →