"On major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus. They agree on little and understand one another less and less." So wrote Robert Kagan in his masterpiece Paradise and Power.

If anyone doubted the truth of Kagan's statement when it was first published in 2003, the weeks since the death of Osama bin Laden must have made them think again. After President Obama had announced the death of the most prominent mass-murderer of Americans in recent history, crowds came onto the streets of Washington and New York: sometimes in vigil for the lost lives of September 11, 2001, sometimes more raucously, but all grateful that the most prominent foe of their country was dead.

 
"Muslims Against Crusades" march in London after bin Laden's death (Mirror Image Photos/Demotix)

In London, a city that had also reverberated to the effects of bin Laden's death-cult, the reaction was rather different. Prime Minister David Cameron was careful to stress the ecumenicalism of bin Laden's victims. From Lambeth Palace, the Archbishop of Canterbury explained that he felt "a very uncomfortable feeling". Very well, one might say, he is a man of the cloth, unlikely ever to declare himself delighted at the news of bin Laden's death.

Then the high priests of the new secular church of human rights joined in, though with less humility. Geoffrey Robertson QC and Michael Mansfield QC both proclaimed that the rights of bin Laden had been most shamefully abused. They argued that the American forces who entered the compound of the world's most wanted terrorist should have conducted themselves differently, preferably arresting him and bringing him to trial in a proper internationally approved court. 

The Guardian and other newspapers picked up on this line, but the main point of the story had swiftly changed. It soon became not about the demise of a celebrated terrorist, but doubt about the wisdom of America's actions. It was self-doubt that spurred it. By the afternoon of the announcement a radio presenter in London asked me if we shouldn't be wary of expressions of glee over bin Laden's death. After all, he said (apparently forgetting that for ten years we have been told that bin Laden has no connection with Islam): "Don't we live in ‘a multicultural society' where we must respect the feelings of Muslims?"