I just sent this to Jackie Spinner at the WaPo. Blogdom is laughing their ass off at her.
I Thought I Would Die of Embarrassment
[ed. - Jackie Spinner of the Washington Post covers the most poignant story to arise from the Iraq quagmire: Iraqi resistors humiliated into militant rage, as U.S. soldiers search their girlymag stashes. Right in front of their moms. Our Washington correspondent did some digging in a K Street dumpster and found more tragic stories of embarrassment cut from the original story. You can find more in-depth analysis at LGF and Tim Blair.]
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Mustafa, 26, a college graduate with a degree in Psychology, seems an unlikely candidate for the Iraqi resistance. All that changed one afternoon when US soldiers raided the modest home he shares with his mother in Mosul.
"The soldiers, they are to be coming into the house without the knocking," he recalls. "I was in the basement, innocently to IM some of the friends on the AOL Messenger, as for not to listen to Mother always for complaining about the job-seekings."
After his mother allowed soldiers to search his room, a detachment of Marines soon found one of Mustafa's dreaded secrets: his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Underoos.
"It began with the laughings," he recalls tearfully. "Then they began to toss the Underoos from crusader to crusader, and to interrogate about the, how you say, 'skidmarks.'"
By the time the soldiers had left, the devastating experience had taken its toll. After slapping his mother uncontrollably, Mustafa had vowed to join the resistance to exact revenge on the Americans.
"I will behead the Infidels, and show the world that they are the ones with the humorous underpants, not me," he says, angrily.
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Tales of embarrassment at the hands of American military forces abound in the capital city of Baghdad. Faisal, 19, recounts an episode last September as US Army troops were distributing food in the impoverished Sadr City section.
"I was with my mother for to help get the flour, and there were many of the beautiful neighborhood girls around," he says. "I am then smell the bad gas smell. I say to a crusader, 'I think I am smelling the passing of wind!'"
The callous response of an American soldier would eventually create another enemy inside this war-ravaged country.
"A crusader point to me and say, 'he who is to be smelt it, is one who dealt it!'" says Faisal, his eyes fiery with indignation.
After suffering through a withering crescendo of giggles, Faisal began slapping his mother uncontrollably.
Now a senior deputy to militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Faisal says the false fart charges radicalized him to fight against occupation.
"The Americans are Devils!" says Faisal. "They will taste death, as will their giggling collaborator girls, like Fatima!"
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Perhaps no single Iraqi has suffered a greater humiliation at the hands of the US Military than Iqtaab Hassan. As a pudgy, socially inept teenager, Hassan was forced last year to stand helplessly by as US Special Forces searched his bedroom in a middle-class area of Baghdad. What they found would change his life forever.
Rifling through his D&D guidebooks and science fiction action figures, an Army Ranger located a home made videotape. On it: Iqtaab Hassan spastically performing a lightsaber fight from Star Wars.
Hasaan's self-taped performance was never meant for public consumption, but soon it would be spread across US military computer networks, and later the Internet. The incident so traumatized Hassan that it would be an entire week until he could muster the nerve to slap his mother.
Today Hassan, reborn as "Mohammed al-Vader," has formed his own splinter cell to violently resist American occupation, and offers an apocryphal warning.
"Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed, occupiers," he says darkly. "The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force."
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