Bob CollinsThe release of Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrah by Scotland on Thursday tests the definitions of compassion. Abdel Baset al-Megrahi served 8 years of a sentence for bombing a plane, killing 259 people aboard, many of them kids from the United States coming home for Christmas in 1988.
Sometimes, concepts of compassion collide with one another.
It could be letting a man with prostate cancer go home to die, feeble and slow afoot going up the plane’s stairs in Scotland.
Or it could be sparing the families of the people he killed from seeing the image of an airport rally hours later, the message of which could easily be interpreted as, “good job on that bombing thing.”
Scotland made its choice.
