Current Events

One moment they said, “peace and safety,” but then came sudden destruction like a thief in the night. For Osama bin Laden and his entourage, calamity struck in the form of American helicopters and US Navy Seals. After a few moments of frenetic terror, bin Laden was dispatched into eternity.

The world has not mourned his slaying. Quite the opposite. When news of his death broke, crowds gathered spontaneously, breaking into impromptu celebration and song. A Philadelphia baseball game came to a halt as fans, and then players, burst into cheers and chants.

Why such jubilation? Why celebrate a human death? It would be easy to dismiss this elation—and some have—as a coarse expression of American triumphalism, as if America were the studio audience and bin Laden were an especially unpopular guest on the Jerry Springer show. A few Christian pundits have worried whether such jubilation is compatible with Christian love and the desire for reconciliation.

Those who experience such concerns should spend a few hours pondering the ferocity of Psalm 137 or reflecting upon the taunt against the king of Babylon in Ezekiel 28. They might even consider the ground of the encouragement that Paul offers in 2 Thessalonians 1:8-9. The sensibilities of these and similar Scriptures cannot be confined to some different dispensation. What they express is a legitimate aspect of the life of faith, and we deny or suppress these expressions to our detriment.

Julian Assange, the Robin Hood of computer hackers, has been on the run for months. From the time he was young, his life has always been one of moving from one place to another, including thirty-seven times by age fourteen. Since founding Wikileaks in 2006, he has continually changed addresses and appearances. Extremely gifted, certainly charismatic, and in his own words “extremely cynical,”¹ 39-year-old Assange has become one of the most well-known people in the world. Convicted of computer hacking in 1995 and given a minor penalty, the Australian native and his organization have posted documents about Guantanamo Bay detentions, Sarah Palin’s personal Yahoo email account, and extrajudicial killings in Kenya and East Timor.²

Now he has taken on the US military and State Department. To many, including Daniel Ellsberg, Assange is a hero of extraordinary proportions. Time Magazine has nominated him for “Person of the Year.”³ To others, including an increasing number of his fellow Wikileakers, he has begun to lose touch with reality.

Assange sees the United States as the greatest political threat to the world—to the point that many of his co-workers say that he is obsessed with America.⁴ Far beyond the illusory dream of Woodrow Wilson, Assange believes that by taking on America via Wikileaks, he is making the world safe for democracy.⁵

But Assange has not achieved what he set out to attain. True, he leaked the information that a US gunship fired on the wrong target in Baghdad and killed, among others two journalists. But his leaks also produced little-known information about how America’s foe, the Taliban fighters, have repeatedly beheaded their enemies.⁶ And who would have expected that Wikileaks would have revealed that Saudia Arabia and Bahrain—not (US supported) Israel—are the real hawks in the Middle East against Iran? James Ruben writes in The New Republic that the disclosures “undermine the very worldview that Julian Assange and his colleagues at Wikileaks almost certainly support.”⁷

In the process of leaking information, Wikileaks has endangered lives and angered a host of nations. The conflict Julian Assange has begun is equivalent to taking on several grizzly bears in a fistfight. He doesn’t stand a chance.

Shortly after he ascended the papal chair, Pope Benedict XVI declared that one of his goals was to re-Christianize a secular Europe. If anyone has had the know-how for the project, it is surely he. But it looks like it’s going to be a long haul. After chastising the American bishops for their irresponsible handling of sexual abuse cases among the clergy in 2008, he has to tackle the scandal here.