Ta-Nehisi tries to comprehend a world where Osama bin Laden’s son Omar could admit “My father hated his enemies more than he loved his sons”:
One of the motivating beliefs behind this blog is that people are people, that tags like “madman,” “evil” and even “terrorist” are, very often, escape hatches which allow us to avoid the hard work of understanding the evil encoded in all of us. Often I argue that slaveholdersConfederateswhoever must be seen as humans.
But he admits he doesn’t “care how they shot Bin Laden” and that he is “unable to consider Bin Laden as part of the human family”:
It is such a scary thing when it happens to you, when your principles become alleged and incidental, when you lose interest in the debate. It is so very dangerous to make exceptions. It is so very dangerous to go cold.
The Dish 