Is it ever okay to tell students that someone’s death is a good thing?

courtesy of Pixabay CC0 Public Domain

Reports have come out today, not for the first time, that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of all Muslims and the leader of the Daesh Death Cult (aka ISIS, ISIL, or Islamic State) may have been killed in a US Air Strike. According to the USA Today report, US sources cannot confirm the Death Cult leaders demise, but it has been reported as fact by the Islamic news source AlhlulBayt, among others.

If indeed this purveyor of murder, torture, and destruction has been killed, how can this be other than good news for everyone in the world except his Cult followers? He held Daesh together through the power of his personality and his twisted preaching of Islam. Without him, will the Cult be able to go on? Is there another among the ranks of these Death Worshippers who has the Satanic charisma to take al-Baghdadi’s place? For the sake of the world, let us hope and pray not.

Now comes the sticky issue. While I know it would be wrong to tell my students to rejoice at this human being’s death, would it be wrong to tell them that his death is a good thing for the world? In 1945, would teachers around the US and the free and newly freed world have hesitated to say that Hitler’s death was a good thing?

Alas, those were different times, before we became a nation of political correctness afraid to call a rose a rose for fear of offending those who think it is a tulip. If the death of al-Baghdadi is confirmed, will teachers have to present this news to their students in obfuscatory terms so as not to make it seem as though this man’s death is something to celebrate.

When Osama bin Laden died, though my middle grade students had no firsthand memories of the 9/11 attacks, they by-and-large acknowledged that his death was a good thing. As their teacher, I did not tell them that bin Laden’s death was something to celebrate, rather I explained why his death was as necessary for the good of humanity as cutting away a limb consumed with gangrene is for the good of the body.

How much more so then will the death of al Baghdadi, if it is confirmed, be seen as a necessary amputation of a gangrenous growth on the body of humanity; the removal of one part of a diseased ideology that if allowed to spread will eventually bring death and oppression to us all.

Perhaps between now and school starting again in the fall I will find a socially acceptable way to express the idea that, yes, at times, someone’s death is a good thing.

As always, I remain,

The Exhausted Educator