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Politics : WAR on Terror. Will it engulf the Entire Middle East? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scoobah who wrote (7983)	11/16/2004 1:00:48 PM
From: Haim R. Branisteanu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32591

A new page in brutality By AMNON RUBENSTEIN Contrasting the 'new barbarism' with the old On November 11 the The Times of London reported that US-led Iraqi forces said they had "found 'hostage slaughterhouses' in Fallujah, used by Islamic militants to kill foreign captives." Several weeks earlier, on October 7, Muslim zealots murdered 32 vacationers in twin terror attacks in Sinai at Taba and the resort area of Ras a-Satan. That same day their ideological brethren butchered Kenneth Bigley, a 62-year-old British citizen. They beheaded him with a sword, recorded the murder on video as usual, and sent it, maybe by satellite, to an Abu Dhabi television station even as his family in Liverpool, and his wife in Thailand, were praying for his well-being. Abu Dhabi television refused to air the atrocity, but the tape quickly found its way onto the Internet. No one who has watched the entire monstrous tape - I didn't have the strength - could erase from memory the nightmare that conjoined the worst barbarianism with the best in modern technology. It should be remembered that a beheading is not always completed with one slash of the knife. I'll spare you the details of how Bigley's murder was effected. So far some 150 foreigners have been kidnapped in Iraq as civilian hostages. Thirty have been executed - mostly beheaded with a sword - and dozens others await their fates, including two French journalists whose release was supposedly promised to Muslim and pro-Muslim parties in France. No one even knows how many Iraqis have been kidnapped, because they don't "count." Among the hostages who have been murdered are four Americans, one Britain, two Bulgarians, a dozen Nepalese (of which only one was beheaded; the others were lucky to be shot dead), two Pakistanis and one South American. All the victims were civilians, including some who came to rebuild Iraq's shattered economy. Two of the victims were as young as 26. So far no woman hostage has been beheaded, but if that day comes the job will probably be given to a masked female. The past 100 years have witnessed massacres on a monstrous scale. So, numerically speaking, the victims of Islamic terror have been few - certainly compared to the tens of thousands of daily murders by Hitler, Stalin and the Khmer Rouge. BUT IT'S worth contrasting the new barbarism with the old. First of all, here we have murder in the name of religion. The Nazi and communist murderers killed in the name of their respective ideologies, but certainly not in the name of God. The Iraqi hostages are killed in an act of religious ritual; before Eugene Armstrong's head was chopped off, the murderers called him a "Christian dog." This is a return to the darkest era in human history. The second difference is even more significant: The Nazis and the communists hid the massacres they committed. Nazi Germany considered the extermination of the Jews a "Reich secret." It denied reports of the destruction of European Jewry - indeed, described them as atrocious propaganda - and sought to mislead the world by a staged visit of the International Red Cross to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Stalin and his gang also staunchly denied all rumors of the killing of the Kulaks and the reality of the Gulags, even inviting gullible observers to refute them. Cambodia was completely closed to the international press so that the murders there could proceed in secrecy. The Islamic terrorists have opened a new page in the history of human barbarianism. They film their murders and broadcast them to the world. In that respect the killers of hostages - just like Palestinian suicide bombers who tape themselves boasting about the murders they are about to commit - "surpass" the Nazis and communists in their atrocities. Granted, nothing must ever be compared to the crimes of the Nazis. Nothing is equal to the industrial murder of millions. One can, however, compare the level of barbarianism of different acts of murder. But the most shocking phenomenon has to do not with the killers, but with the people for whom the tapes are intended. How is it that no popular protest movement has arisen among religious Muslims against those who have hijacked Islam - with its glorious past - and harnessed it for nefarious purposes? Why aren't Muslim clerics from Marrakesh to Jakarta crying out against this hijacking? Even more amazing, and monstrous, is the phenomenon of acclimating to monstrosity. The New York Times dropped the words "Christian dog" from its report of Armstrong's murder. Ed Koch, the former New York mayor, bitterly protested that omission, but don't expect the paper to change its politically correct reporting. Moreover, Western enlightened forces play a major - albeit unintended - role in transforming what the Islamists are doing into something normative. Take the Reuters news agency. In its reports on a recent suicide bombings in Jerusalem, for instance, I could not locate a word about the victims or their families. In contrast, there was plenty of focus on the suffering of the murderers' families. And, in thinking about how the media has been conditioning us to acclimate to violent Islamist behavior, let's not ignore the semantic angle: AP insists on calling the killers of the Iraqi hostages "insurgents." But if the murder of unarmed civilians for political purposes is not terrorism, what is? We had better understand how insidious it is to imagine that the new barbarism is an improvement on the original. The writer, founder of the Shinui movement and a former education minister, is dean of the Radzyner School of Law at The Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya. Continued « Previous \| 1 \| 2 jpost.com