I don’t care what you believe, what awful things you’ve seen to make you hate - if you think an aeroplane ploughing into a skyscraper full of civilians is a good thing there is something seriously wrong with you.
So what was wrong with Osama bin Laden?
Like Muhammad Atta, the pilot of the second plane to strike the World Trade Centre, bin Laden was an educated man from a privileged background.
He was not a trained religious or military leader and struggled to gain recognition from other militant Islamic groups. He began his new life sponsoring foreign mujahedin fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.
He then spawned al-Qaida apparently to rid the Middle East of the toxic anti-Muslim influence of the United States and to establish Sharia law in the region. Its acts of public terror were designed to draw the US into a war of attrition and, it seems, to exercise some old fashioned barbaric revenge (“It occurred to me to punish America so it could taste some of what we are tasting”).
Al-Qaida though has never had a clear ideology, and membership required swearing allegiance to bin Laden personally - a prerequisite that dissuaded many potential suitors.
He could have been a true fundamentalist, sickened by his own decadent upbringing, or simply a kid on a power trip escaping his father’s shadow.
Perhaps he was just bored. “Life is first boredom, then fear”, wrote Philip Larkin, and there is a common element to all armies - from African revolutionaries to jihadists to the US marines: bored boys with guns.
Whatever his motivations, his actions were to make him a “targeted kill”.
Earlier this year my young daughter started school. She entered further into the public and social sphere where there exists the real prospect of harm coming to her. You become more aware of what is referred to as “stranger danger”.
She has already heard such strangers screeching about in the streets where she later discovers their tyre marks.
I wonder if even the unintentional killers of children realise what a parent is capable of; that there are placid people behind staid suburban frontages who would gladly kill them, chase them down the street and murder them.
The thought of a child not reaching adulthood is unbearable, and most parents would sacrifice their own lives to prevent it happening.
There are some seriously dark minds, including those belonging to serial killers of adults, that can’t abide the death of children, or people who harm children.
And that’s why the deliberate killing of children put bin Laden into a special league. A league where torture is condoned and the firing of a bullet to your chest to immobilise you and another to your head to kill you is celebrated in a Presidential Address.
The Navy SEALS came for him in the early hours, when sleep is deepest. But it wasn’t just the late hour that caused his fatal lack of preparedness; he simply wasn’t prepared.
He had an eternity to ready himself for a confrontation with the approaching combatants who were “methodically” working their way through each segment of the compound.
Reports stated he had an AK-47 and a handgun and yet he didn’t use them. By the time they reached him he was just standing there in the main bedroom. Perhaps he’d had enough of caves to want to dig an escape tunnel. Perhaps he’d had enough of escape.
His fame ironically had made him a recluse. He couldn’t revel in the presence of sycophants: his main company being his less easily impressed family. He knew, if he wanted to stay alive, he could never venture out.
Footage shows a stooping, prematurely aged man surrounded by clothes and children’s toys.
It was as if he wanted to die - to escape his domestic prison, to achieve martyrdom, to reach Paradise. Or was it dread, at that fearful hour, of the horrible acts he was responsible for?
Martin Amis tried to describe the last moments of Muhammad Atta’s existence:
American II struck [the North Tower] at 8.46.40. Atta’s body was beyond all healing by 8.46.41; but his mind, his presence, needed time to shut itself down. The physical torment - a panic attack in every nerve, a riot of the atoms - merely italicised the last shinings of his brain.
What were bin Laden’s last thoughts when that slug from a 9mm pistol (or an assault rifle) entered his brain above the left eye obliterating the frontal lobe - the seat of his murky mind, the home of his ruthless ideas?
Was the gunning down of an unarmed man in front of his family a good thing? Probably not. But, and I know this is an unfortunate thing to admit, if he had been responsible for the death of my young daughter I wouldn’t have shown the professional restraint of the Navy SEAL who stopped after firing two rounds - I would have emptied the magazine.
Such an instinct for revenge, of course, is the reason the killing won’t end soon.
It also must be remembered that even bin Laden said in 2004: “stop killing our children and women.”
Do CIA directors and US military chiefs wake up at night haunted by reminders of their “collateral damage”?
We’re still living with the guilt of our own civilian terror campaigns of World War 2 like the firebombings of Hamburg and Dresden, and the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Watch a small child being blown apart and suddenly, causes like Islamic extremism and even the good old US of A, can all go to hell.
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