Canada agrees

Osama bin Laden changed the world for the worse, and the world

is better off with him dead.

His vocation was murder of the innocent - including children, even Muslim children - for a political goal whose highest expression was Afghanistan under the Taliban, a medievalism that served up executions in a soccer stadium and beat and stoned women who dared show their faces in public.

An evil has been removed from the world. What else was it but evil to ask of a generation of Muslim youth in every country to join in cold-blooded murder? His call proved seductive in scores of countries, even Canada. But the vast majority rejected him. 

Ultimately, something happened that bin Laden would never have predicted: Many of the people he sought to enlist in his murderous program took to the streets to demand in their countries the democracy that people in the West take for granted. The yearning for freedom was far more powerful than his lies and his bombs. It is fitting that his end came during the Arab spring.

What did he really accomplish, then? He did radicalize some elements in the Muslim world, built a global infrastructure of terror and created a private army of adherents. He did adapt his primitive ideals to contemporary technologies, thereby extending his poisonous reach. He did inspire mass killing and war. Yet he could not frighten the democracies into abandoning their principles.

There was no sign of Muslims rushing into the streets to protest the killing of bin Laden. The cult he led, of mass murder in the pursuit of medievalism, is not dead yet, but its death is a step closer, and so the dancing in the streets of New York, and the quieter sense of relief and jubilation in Canada, are only natural. Evil cannot be accommodated; it must be expunged.

- The Globe and Mail, Toronto