Osama bin Laden: No one's hero

In America, where life is precious and humans are treated with dignity and respect in spite of religious beliefs or sexual orientation, it is very rare for maniacal grins to wash across our faces at the news of someone's death.

But that's just what happened Sunday night when anyone who was still awake found out via some sort of technological mode of communication that Osama bin Laden had been killed.

It's the first and, I pray, the last time in my life that I call anyone to tell them the good news that someone has just been shot in the head.

For those of you who have been unconscious for the last two days due to our final exams and are just now coming to, bin Laden was killed by U.S. soldiers while he "hid" in a well-protected compound in Pakistan, surrounded by homes of high-ranking retired military officials.

While radicals and followers saw him as a powerful hero, he has never had any evidence for this claim. He worked off of the reputation he developed during combat against Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s, a claim questioned by even some of his most ardent supporters.

Intelligence sources claim bin Laden only saw combat once, in a seven-day barrage, where the Afghans dug themselves into caves using his construction equipment.

If any of his supporters try to say his legacy is a brave and noble one, it will be drawn from nothing but thin air, and although he hid behind the face of a religion, his lust for blood was all he was committed to.

While bin Laden's father had multiple wives and more than 50 kids, bin Laden's mother was a foreigner who his father acquired during a vacation. Within the family she was said to be known as "the slave" and bin Laden as "the slave child." 

His experiences as a child may very well have led to his involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic radical group who believe that most of the Muslim world lived in violation of the true meaning of the Quran. After all, a longing for genocide doesn't just happen overnight.

This involvement led to the formation of al-Qaida and what seemed to be a personal goal of infamy for bin Laden. When the U.S. published a list of the most-wanted terrorists in 1997 and he didn't make the cut, bin Laden called on all Muslims to "obey God's order" and kill Americans, including civilians, "wherever you find them."

Although he called on Muslims to aid in this fight, he simultaneously killed them as well, yet still stood behind the alibi that what he was doing was meant to help the Islamic world.

My grin has faded as I realize that although bin Laden's death may have made us safer here in the U.S. and brought vengeance for 9/11, it has done little to nothing for the sad plight of so many others whose only offense was being born in a land so unlike our own.