Probably the lack of dignity it implies.

How sad. The ad for motrin on the site linked to is too much. Who was it that said ?

"East is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet." Rudyard Kipling, I think.

Oh, its a revolving advertisement thing. Now it says, Lots of medications can keep you awake all night. Then it says..click here for a list of other things to avoid...talk to your doctor about solutions. They is nothing like ABC News.

With all due respect it was a Reuters news service
story about beheadings with the accompanying advertisements but it's on abcnews.go.com.

We live in a strange world.

Maybe an aspirin a day can keep a beheading away.

Sorry, I apologize for being a cynic. But, yes, I am on the side of every american and freedom loving people everywhere.

I hope no one here had a problem with this...time for us to start collecting some terrorists and killing them in retaliation, in my view...not by beheading...hanging would be better, and its considered more ignominious in Arab culture....

Mark, you're probably correct about hanging.

But better yet.

Introduce the concept of freedom to as many Arab women as possible. And give them razor sharp knives to cut off the dicks of their slavemasters who continuously abuse them. While they sleep. If they don't die from loss of blood, they surely will die from apoplexy.

Will they then go to paradise and find the 72 virgins who supposedly await them? That would be the best and most appropriate payback of all, considering the circumstances.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Better that than putting panties on their head....right?

I love Arnold Harris's suggestion! I've long advocated that. Plus copious use of pig excrement.

Dean is right. There does seem to be something about beheading that is particularly frightening. As Dowingba suggests, it's partly the lack of dignity. As Mark Noonan points out, hanging is also seen to be ignominous. It's quite un-aesthetic, for sure. Many Germans were indignant when the Nazi murderers sentenced at Nuremburg were hanged rather than shot. Shooting, the firing squad, has been traditionally thought to be more dignified and has traditonally been used by the military in executions.

Also the blood. For some reason, most of us, at least Americans, seem to have a special aversion to the shedding of blood. Not to killing, but to blood. Lethal injection, electrocution, or gassing are just as deadly, but they shed no blood and so those have become the standard methods of execution in the United States.

I think the blood and indignity, the gruesomeness, of beheading has to do with why it was used during the French Revolution, Robespierre's Reign of Terror. The guillotine was originally introduced as a more humane method than those in use during the Ancien Regime, e.g., burning at the stake or breaking on the wheel, and it certainly was more humane.

But the grisly public spectacle of the lopping off of heads day after day, while most sanguine in one sense, was not exactly conducive to a sanguine temperament but more to a melancholic or choleric temperament, to use Hippocrates's ancient typology.