A colleague penned the following comment about the disposal of bin Laden’s “holy body.” Worth a read.
On February 21, 2002, a videotape was released titled “The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl.” The video shows Pearl’s decapitated and mutilated body. On March 10, 2007, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, reputed to be third in command of Al Qaeda under Osama bin Laden, confessed (boasted?) to his captors. ” I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan.” He repeated that statement during before the military tribunal. Pearl’s body was cut in ten pieces and left to rot in a shallow grave. There was no cry of
indignation among Pakistani religious authorities about whether Pearl was given a proper burial, although a Muslim philanthropist hated by the extremists, Abdul Sattar Edhi, collected the body parts and arranged to send them to California for burial. In the aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden and his burial at sea, there have been complaints by some Muslim religious authorities that, by burying OBL at sea, American authorities did not give him the respectful burial to which every Muslim is entitled. I also thought of the hundreds of workers at the World Trade Center who were incinerated by OBL and his crew whose bodies could never be buried in individual graves that their families could recognize. There is something viciously asymmetrical in that moral calculus. Those teachers and religious leaders are quick to complain about slights they believe that been done to their own, yet have not a word on behalf of those they consider infidels. In a way, it’s the same thing with their vicious calls for the killing of all Jews (e.g. Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi) and their demands for laws against “Islamophobia” and hate speech against Islam.
Rabbi Arnold Stiebel, Ph.D.
Mediation Matters of California
Woodland Hills, CA
arnoldst@aol.com
Coast Contact 