posted on Friday, December 10, 2004 12:29 PM
by
Endie
Beheadings and P.R.: a primer for idiot Al Wahabbi cultists
My sister, who's in the police, frequently repeats their mantra that it's just as well criminals are stupid, or we'd really be in trouble. The same goes for islamic fundamentalists: when they get smart (c.f. the twin towers/Pentagon attacks) things get messy.
But at a moment when the well-meaning, liberal states you are fighting (the USA and UK) are torn by divisions over their conduct of the war on humanitarian grounds, and when these democratic states are at a tipping point regarding scattered and rare human rights abuses (of the sort all wars produce, although none the less wrong for it), you do not galvanise public and governmental opinion by videoing yourself hacking off the head of an unarmed, bound and terrified civilian.
Berlusconi was uncomfortably close to the truth when he stated that this is a war of cultures: a culture which can be paralysed into inaction by pictures of its soldiers doing little more than is involved in college hazing rituals set against a culture where many people will undoubtedly be rejoicing the beheading of a defenceless man, simply because he is an American Jew.
Socrates said that no man is capable of intentionally doing evil: that what is clearly evil to us is to him an act perfectly capable of rationalisation within his own moral framework. It wasn't one of of his better arguments at the time, and it doesn't look any better at the moment.