He has issues with his wife, and he has issues with his kids, financial issues, you know, the kids aren't listening, the kids aren't doing this and that. It comes down to (the fact) he's a father and he's a person."

So says 21-year-old Abdurahman Khadr in a Canadian documentary about a family close to the bin Ladens. Abdurhaman’s own father, Ahmed Said Khadr, was an accused al Qaeda financier who was killed in a gun battle with Pakistani police last October. (Ahmed wasn’t much of a father himself. He wanted his sons to follow him into the family business by becoming suicide bombers.)

The Khadrs, who lived in the bin Laden family compound in the Afghan town of Jalalabad for several years, describe Osama as a man who loves volleyball, sport shooting, and riding horses.

"[Osama] had promised [his children] that he would get them a horse if they memorized the Koran. They were so anxious to finish memorizing it so that they could get a horse, which shows you that they're normal children too," said Abdurahman.

Hearing about this documentary reminded me of Hannah Arendt's book, "Eichman in Jerusalem." As a witness at the trial of Nazi Adolph Eichmann, Arendt was surprised to find that Eichmann was such an ordinary man. Her imagination had led her to expect a demon. Instead she found a middle-aged bureaucrat who explained genocide in terms of production quotas and efficiency standards. Her observations led her to the concept of "the banality of evil."

We rightly recoil at such commonplace observations about "monsters" like Eichmann and bin Laden. There is something discomforting about hearing them described as normal people with wives and children. The more heinous the actions of our enemies, the more likely we are to forget that they are more like us than we care to admit; that they are also human. We want to think of them as sub-human vermin, so distant from "good" people like ourselves that they are almost a different species. But as much as Osama and his ilk may justify their dehumanizing of Americans, we can never fall under the same delusion. For if we fall under the same spell of mindless hatred of our enemy we only end up becoming less than human ourselves.

(Hat tip: World)