Things go like this for a few years, and then your friends move on to other things. Around the same time, you develop a taste for oranges, so you start going by Billy’s place. Billy doesn’t know you, but you know enough about him from your friends to know you can take his oranges and he won’t do much about it. So you start taking Billy’s oranges, doing him little favors here and there, but telling him that he better not mess around.

Well, Billy doesn’t exactly like this, and was kind of hoping after your friends left that he’d have some breathing room. But now he’s moved on from one bully to the next–you. So he tells you he’s had enough, and you can keep your dirty mits off his oranges.

This isn’t exactly how you like to be treated, and you want those oranges. So you pass by Billy’s one day and you beat him up a bit, rough him up around the edges, just to show him who’s boss. And you help yourself to some oranges, and tell Billy it’s for his own good. You even tell him you’ll keep other people from taking his oranges, you know, as a favor to Billy.

Billy really is a bit of a pushover, and he’s smarting from your punches and doesn’t quite know what to do, so he agrees to your demands.

Over the next few years, you have a nice relationship with Billy. You get all the oranges you want, and Billy stays in line. Every once in a while he gets out of line, but a bloody nose here, a black eye there, and he shapes up. You’re nice to him, you even pay him for the oranges most of the time, although you demand a good price.

But things build up, and one day, Billy snaps. You go by to get your oranges, and he’s gone nuts. He’s got a baseball bat, and he’s telling you to get lost or else. You kind of have to laugh at this, because you see, you’ve grown up a bit too, and baseball bats don’t mean much to you because you’ve got an automatic rifle with one of those grenade launchers on the bottom. C’mon Billy, seriously? But fine, you’ll play nice with Billy. You agree to pay Billy for all the oranges, and you come to an arrangement that Billy agrees to. Turns out he needs money, and you’ve let it be known around town that nobody else cuts in on your orange deal. Sometimes people do, but you don’t let it get out of hand.

Things go this way for a few years, you buying oranges, Billy selling them to you, reluctantly, and you making sure Billy knows you’ve got that grenade launcher and plenty of ammo.

During these years, Billy develops a bit of a mental disorder. He becomes bitter, flies off the handle at times, is constantly angry, and starts telling everyone that you’re a jerk. He really seems a bit unstable. One time, he even drives by your house and throw a molotov cocktail at it. At least you’re pretty sure he had something to do with it. No huge damage is done, but you’re taking Billy a little more seriously. In fact, you’re feeling like something needs to be done if this goes any farther. Then it does.

Billy starts telling people around town that he’s had enough of you. He says he’s going to buy a gun, and if you mess with him again, he’s going to let you have it. Heck, he might let you have it anyway. Now, you know that it’s unlikely that Billy has a gun, or that he can even get one. They aren’t easy to come by in your town, and you keep tabs on things like that. But still, you are taking this pretty seriously.

So you start thinking to yourself about what you should do. Should you try to negotiate with Billy, try to keep things as they are? After all, you’ve been getting your oranges just fine. Then again, Billy seems a bit off his rocker, and you don’t want to get hurt. You start thinking this would all be easier if you could really show Billy who’s boss in no uncertain terms, or maybe just wipe him off the map. Yeah, kill him. After all, it’s self-defense, right? Who knows what this nutjob is going to do.

You talk with other folks around town, and some are against it, and some seem kind of for it, although they don’t quite want to admit it openly. But who cares, you’re the big man around town, what’s anyone else going to do? Nobody else has a grenade launcher or an automatic weapon like you do. What’s stopping you from just doing what you want to? And who’s going to blame you, after all, Billy is gearing up to kill you. You’re just protecting yourself.

What would you do if you were Billy? What would you do if you were the bully? What would be the best solution for all involved?

There are those who claim that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and in a way that can make some sense. Imagine if China invaded the US, installed a puppet regime with a cruel dictator, and started running our country as they saw fit. Would you fight back? Would you be willing to die to get the invaders out? “Yes,” you might say, “But I wouldn’t kill innocent civilians, that’s barbaric. That’s the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist.” Then are you saying you consider the pilots of WWII who firebombed Tokyo, or dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to be terrorists? After all, wasn’t it the “terror” of those bombing runs that finally convinced the Japanese to surrender unconditionally?

So the argument goes, and where it ends I don’t knows. I’m still forming my opinions. But as to whether or not Osama was evil, I would say he was, in the same way that Martin Luther King was not evil. MLK didn’t like the way things were, and he worked peacefully to change things, and to an extent he was tremendously successful, even if what he started has, in a way, been hijacked and corrupted. Most of us would say that MLK was a good man, who despite his faults, accomplished good things. But imagine MLK had bombed a building and killed 3,000 Americans, in order to try and get his way. Would we still think he was a good guy? I think it likely we would say he was evil, even if his intentions, his ultimate goals for which murder was only a means to an end, were good.

Unfortunately with terrorism there seems to be a deliberate campaign to keep us from thinking about their intentions beyond murder. “They just want to kill people and cause terror” we’re told. This is what I believe a few years ago, but something about it didn’t sit right. I’m sure there are some people who just want to kill and terrorize Americans, but I would guess those people are an extreme minority, the same way serial murderers are an extreme minority in our society, and enjoy little, if any, public support.

But “terrorists” from the Middle East seem to be larger in percentage than what you might expect from a normal distribution of pathological killers. And these terrorists seem to enjoy a fair amount of public support in their countries, which is quite different than how most people feel about serial murderers. Is it that so many Middle Easterners are cold-blooded killers and terrorists at heart, or is there some logic behind their emotions and motivations?

Within the past few weeks I’ve heard multiple people claim that the US has only done good in the Middle East, and that the US government bears no responsibility for the hostility many in the Middle East feel towards the US. However, as I’ve studied Middle Eastern  history, especially that since WWII, I see that the US has been heavily involved in Middle Eastern politics. The US government has set up governments, rigged elections, supported cruel dictators–we’ve even sent CIA operatives to train secret police forces on how to torture. In learning this side of history, things have started to make sense. Many in the Middle East see the US government as an invader, a usurper of the people’s right to govern themselves, and that perspective does not seem wholly unjustified. Osama’s explicit and primary demand was that the US leave Saudi Arabia and the Middle East generally and leave them alone.

So, while we condemn Osama’s method of trying to achieve his objectives, should we be so quick to condemn what he wanted to accomplish? Were the ends wrong, or just the means of getting there?