Terrorists Now Behead IRAQI Hostage (Joe Gandelman)
Joe Gandelman
Now they finally did it: the terrorists who have beheaded foreign hostage/victims have now beheaded an Iraqi who was working in a capacity to help his country's reconstruction — and done it with a flourish:
All the usual statements from the doomed victim before the act. All of it captured on video. The final defiling of the victim's body, by placing the head on top of the body. Their final statement after they murdered this poor guy was a blatant warning for other Iraquis not to cooperate.
The best roundup and handling of this story can be found via James Joyner's Outside the Beltway so click here. You have a choice of how much you want to learn and see — but his post is comprehensive (as usual).
PS: In advertising they always said: "Sex sells." You can say that in terrorism "beheadings beget" — they beget publicity, they beget concessions, they beget fear. And all on a shoestring budget (overpower someone, keep him prisoner, keep him shackled then have a couple of people kill him for a video production that'll be seen all over the world).
Of course its easy to sound so philosophical about it all when you are sitting at a desk reading about this repeatedly on a computer monitor; probably infinitely harder if you are sitting barefoot in some dirty room in a building in Iraq, dressed in the orange death suit, with a gang of killers in black lined up behind you telling you how you are about to die in the name of allah and the Arab nation, or whatever.
But make no mistake, the first time you read about this, it shocks. After a few occasions it gets to sound like someone being struck out at a baseball game. But the real effect ought to be to make all free people mad enough to flatten all these islamo-fascist bastards and clean up Iraq in a greater hurry and very thoroughly. Is that psychological effect happening? Tell me if I'm wrong about this.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I think 'we' make a big deal of it because it's so thoroughly evil.
It's done intentionally to an individual. One life at a time. It's done up close, with physical contact between the the person being killed and the thing doing the killing. It's gory. It's perceived by many as demeaning to the person being killed.
(I personally don't see it that way. When one is - through no fault of their own - restrained and helpless at the premature end of one's life, I do not deduct "dignity" points for it.)
It's not an accident, like electrocution, a car or plane crash.
It's not death by disease, where - when the time comes - there's nothing anyone can do to stop it anymore.
It's not "collateral damage" where innocents are killed as a side-effect of killing the guilty.
It's not "random" like those killed or maimed by suicide bombers.
It's not "impersonal" like gunfire-at-a-distance.
It's not a death at the hands of an enemy during a battle.
It's evil. The things doing the killing intend to do exactly what they do. They revel in the torture of the prelude, and they post movies of their deeds on the Internet for the world to see. They act without fear, because the person they act against has been stripped of his ability to defend himself. By the time it happens, he is outgunned, outnumbered, and has left no rational hope to prevail.
The only thing that would make it more evil is if the things doing the killing showed their faces in those videos.
That they hide reveals the one tattered shred of decency left in them - they know it's wrong, and want to avoid retribution. That they do it anyhow is proof that the shred of decency is totally insufficient and irrelevant.
It is a reminder that the forces against us are without moral restraint of any kind. I thought Bush was a bit over the edge when he said it in September 2001, but I've come to agree with him completely. We are fighting against evil.
Killings of this type remind us of that.
Well now they can do it. This time it’s up to them. We will help, but now they’re the ones with the ball. If they want freedom they’re going to have to fight and kill for it. Freedom has one price – blood. It’s time for them to earn their freedom.