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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (46110)	5/13/2004 6:22:31 AM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 50167

America condemns abuses, while Islamic radicals celebrate murder. There's a difference. We believe in and proud to write this.. Message 20118378 Message 20117729 Mainstream America believes in this.. No moral equivalence grandforksherald OUR VIEW: America condemns abuses, while Islamic radicals celebrate murder. There's a difference. President Bush has apologized for the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Donald Rumsfeld may yet resign over the incident, and in November the president himself could lose his job. In addition, the soldiers who conducted the abuse are being court-martialed, one by one. Will Osama bin Laden apologize for the beheading of 26-year-old Nick Berg? Will the Islamic militants who held Berg down be punished by their leaders in some way? No. That's because Berg's murder was policy for the militants. It was business as usual, just another medieval slaying of an infidel - who, remember, was not a soldier but a civilian, a person who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. "Any sort of moral equivalence between our flawed democracy and Islamism's pathological hatred is obscene," journalist Andrew Sullivan wrote Wednesday on his Web log. "In the midst of our own deserved self-criticism, we are suddenly reminded of the larger stakes" and the wider war. Count the ways the Abu Ghraib abuse - or, more importantly, its aftermath - and the murder of Berg point out the stark differences between the two warring systems. The American armed forces are governed by a set of rules. Those rules evolved through the centuries, as humankind realized the need for ethics and restraint to govern even a soldier's actions in war. Not all soldiers abide by the rules, as Abu Ghraib proved. But the soldiers at Abu Ghraib still are subject to the rules. They can't stay anonymous or hide behind masks, as Berg's murderers are doing. Instead, the prison guards (and anyone else in the chain of command who's found culpable) will be made to answer at trial the charges that they grossly mistreated the prisoners in their charge. In contrast, Berg's murderers know no such rules, and honor no bond with their fellow human beings. They ignored any issue of guilt or innocence; Berg simply was an American and in Iraq - that was enough. He also was Jewish, as was Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was decapitated in 2002 at the hands of Islamic radical justice. Nor was Berg executed with an eye to a quick or painless death. Instead, his killers slit his throat then kept hacking until they'd separated his head, which they held up and displayed as if it were the head of a sacrificial goat. Most important, there'll be no al-Qaida equivalent of Congressional hearings, no calls from fellow warriors for the killers to be tried and jailed. That's because the ritual killing was the essence of Islamic fundamentalism at work. That is the militants' policy and that is their plan, as they showed the world Sept. 11 and have proved over and over again. And that's worth remembering as we set about winning the war. grandforks.com