Whose death should be celebrated, Christine?
To the Times:
Christine Flowers in her recent article about Rush Limbaugh: “I was taught that we do not celebrate death, even when we hated the life that was taken.”
Christine Flowers in 2011, shortly after the death of Osama bin Laden: “Instead of giving bin Laden a burial that allegedly comported at least in some ways with Islamic tradition, we should’ve chopped him up into 3,000 pieces, one for each of the deaths on 9/11, photographed them for a nice display at a modernart gallery (right next to the crucifixes in urine) and then tossed them on the scrap heap of history.”
The main opinion Ms. Flowers expressed in her Rush Limbaugh piece is pretty OK. If she believes the response to a human being’s death should never be “good riddance,” that’s fine with me, even if I am not entirely convinced. However, if that is Ms. Flowers’ true belief, how do we reconcile her 2011 piece titled “Bin Laden death celebrations were righton?” One simple way is to assume that Christine has changed her mind. It was written almost ten years ago, after all. If that is the case and Ms. Flowers is willing to say she was wrong in 2011, great.
Unfortunately, I have a sneaking suspicion she would not back down from what she wrote. That’s not entirely awful, given Osama bin Laden was a despicable man who caused a lot of misery, although some issues with the article, including torture advocacy, the gruesome “modern-art” quote, and casual islamophobia, make it problematic. Still, if Ms. Flowers is down to celebrate bin Laden’s death, but not Limbaugh’s, there can really only be one explanation: Ms. Flowers believes bin Laden’s death deserved celebration, but Limbaugh’s did not. Again, that’s an OK opinion for Ms. Flowers to have. How awful a person was and where the threshold for post-death celebration falls are decisions for each person to make (and the only thing I imagine almost all of us can agree on is that bin Laden was worse than Limbaugh). It simply seems Ms. Flowers thinks the “awfulness threshold” for celebrating a person’s death was surpassed by bin Laden, but not Limbaugh.
The problem is that Ms. Flowers expressed a whole different opinion - that no death should be celebrated. So it’s either hypocrisy, in order to unfairly shame those who put Limbaugh above that threshold above which she put bin Laden, or a change of heart. Which is it, Ms. Flowers?
(By the way, Ms. Flowers, although I used the word “islamophobia” in this letter, that does not give you license to ignore the actual thesis of the letter and act as if all I did was baselessly accuse you of racism or attempt to “cancel” you.)