It's quite healthy IMO to connect with your feminine part of your brain but I draw the line at referring to it as a seperate individual.


Dave TWB. I actually agree with you on the lack of moral outrage in the Arab world. Death, mutilation and torture should rightly be codemned by anyone who considers themselves a human being. IMO, the prison scandal and the lack of outrage in the Arab world with regards to terrorists, suicide bombers and the like is a good example of what holoucaust scholars refer to as the 'banality of evil'. Where evil can be so institutionalized and beauracritized to where people don't even acknwoledge evil or see themselves as evil. They're just following orders or doing it for the fatherland, or for the cause, or for god or flag.

Arab indifference and even approval of American death IMO is no different than the banality of evil shown by the majority of German society during WWII in regards to opressing all of Europe and the indifference and even approval regarding the atrocities of the Holoucast and of Jewish persecution. I don't excuse German society for this (as most do, dismissing it as a Hitler thing or Nazi thing or an SS thing) but I try to use it to understand how whole societies can fall sway to evil ideas and propaganda and see these ideas and actions as perefectly understandable and acceptable.

Instead of pointing fingers at their supposed lower morality or animalistic nature, how 'bout trying to add context to their indifference instead of patting ourselves in the back about how we're so superior to them. This is not to excuse the insurgents actions or the Arab worlds lack of outrage, but to try to understand why. To react anyway else is simply another slippery slope to even greater hatred and escalation. And I was under the impression we were in the Middle East to bring democracy and win hearts and minds, not to force them to heel to our superiority.

I don't like people being dehumanized and generalized anywhere. It opens the door for justification of anything you want to do to someone. Whether abuse them in a prison or behead them on videotape.

Quote:

Many in Middle East view deaths of U.S. contractors with indifference
Posted by: Editor on Thursday, April 22, 2004 - 02:00 PM

By Hannah Allam
Knight Ridder Newspapers

AMMAN, Jordan - One question emerged for many Arabs who watched the grisly images this week of four American civilians whose bodies were burned and mutilated after an ambush in Iraq:

So what?

While the horrific killings Wednesday in the restive town of Fallujah outraged Americans and prompted the U.S.-led coalition to vow an "overwhelming" response, the incident barely registered in the Middle East, where the big news was an Enrique Iglesias concert in Egypt. The dead contractors were largely forgotten.

"Who cares?" said Fida Alsha'er, a columnist for a Jordanian women's magazine. "It's another example of how American life is considered something very expensive, very important, while the Arab life is worth nothing."

The Uncle Sam restaurant sits in the heart of Amman, the Jordanian capital, and its sign is all-American red, white and blue. But that's where the kinship with the United States ends. Tamer, a 24-year-old waiter who wouldn't give his last name, watched Egyptian soap operas at the cafe Saturday instead of western channels that featured persisting questions of when the U.S. would retaliate.

"It's not good to celebrate mutilation, but Iraq is an Arab country under American occupation," Tamer said with a shrug. "Iraqis have the right to fight back."

The four Americans, who worked for a North Carolina security firm, were ambushed as they drove through Fallujah on Wednesday. A jeering mob kicked, beat and dragged their charred corpses through the street. Two bodies were shown hung on a bridge over the Euphrates River. Clerics on Friday denounced the dismemberment as a grave sin in Islam, but stopped short of condemning the killings.

The two most-watched Arab satellite channels, al Arabiya and al Jazeera, showed unusual restraint in their treatment of the images Wednesday. Arabiya aired most of the scene, but blurred the bodies. Jazeera refrained from showing any photos. It was not clear whether the decision was out of sensitivity or because the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council has in the past banned both stations for airing "inflammatory" footage.

In Iraq - as well as Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Algeria and Egypt - newspapers ran initial reports of the incident at the bottom of the front page or buried inside. By this weekend, the papers either ignored developments in the story or stressed the failure of U.S. troops to stop the bloodshed in Iraq.

On Saturday, CNN International featured relatives eulogizing the dead men as freedom-loving heroes. Arabic-language news channels showed footage of Iraqis ripping, burning and trampling on the American flag at an unrelated demonstration. Most Arab media never even identified the slain men.


"There is so much animosity against Americans that people, on the whole, don't regard this mutilation as against individual corpses," said Labib Kamhawi, a Jordanian political analyst. "They feel this was something done against American policy, against America."

Amr al Azm, a 40-year-old Syrian archeologist, has given lectures in the United States on Arab jubilation at American deaths, particularly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He likens the situation to a speed demon cruising down the highway and cutting off other drivers. When the fast car crashes, al Azm said, the gut reaction of the law-abiding drivers is, "He got what he deserves."

That instinctive satisfaction of mighty America taking a loss, he added, was only intensified by Israel's assassination last month of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the beloved spiritual leader for the Palestinian militant group Hamas. An Israeli gunship fired three rockets at the elderly and disabled sheikh as he left a Gaza City mosque after prayers, sparking massive protests throughout the Arab world.

A shadowy group calling itself "Brigades of Martyr Ahmed Yassin" claimed responsibility for the Fallujah ambush in a statement that, like the attack itself, received little attention in the Arab world.

"It's not a big incident in the daily litany of woes in the Middle East," al Azm said in a telephone interview from his home in Damascus. "The Arab media is full of this stuff every single day. Just last week, we saw the mutilated remains of Sheikh Yassin and his wheelchair. Was there similar outrage in America over that?"

Hundreds of American troops in Iraq never saw the gruesome Fallujah footage in full because many satellite TV networks didn't show it and many Internet sites are blocked on U.S. bases. Marine Lt. Col. John Pioli, however, happened to be in Jordan and watched a snippet of the incident on Arab television.

"For 10 minutes, I was disgusted, upset, extremely angry and thinking that being here is a waste of my time," said Pioli, who is helping to rebuild the Iraqi military. "Then I thought, `Nope, there's still too much work to be done.' I want to do what I need to do so I can prevent my son from ever having to come here.



Quote:


What I'd like to know, Dave, is:
Where is your outrage for the four Americans killed in Fallujah three weeks ago, who were beaten to death, burned, had their bodies dismembered, had their vivisected bodies dragged by Iraqis through the streets of Fallujah, and then hung on display from a nearby bridge?
Where is your outrage, where is the world's outrage, at this?!?

And where is your outrage for al Qaida's beheading (beheading !!) on video ( !!) of an American civilian, Michael Berg. Something that has been graphically run repeatedly on arab news. No doubt to gleeful audiences throughout the muslim world.

From what I've seen, these incidents have largely been ignored and glossed over in Arab and European news. Selective rage is reserved for the shortcomings of the United States.

And as Fouad Ajami said in the PBS discussion I posted on page 2 of this topic (which you apparently ignored) the Arabs always have negative things to say about the United States, as do France, as do other anti-American factions and leftists worldwide. With or without Abu Ghraib.
The United States is already correcting its mistakes.

Our allies understand that this is war, and these kind of things, tragic as they are, unfortunate as they are, occasionally happen in war.
And for our enemies, it's just another excuse to attack the United States, just more feul for an already raging fire of partisan hatred for the United States.



All those atrocities are outrageous but keep in mind they were done by thugs and terrorists. They're not really accountable to anyone except themselves and their own hatred. There is outrage over the prison scandal BECAUSE people expect better from the United States of America. Ever since the mercanaries' bodies were mutilated and now with the beheading, i've seen some people react as if the prison scandal is justified in light of these actions. As if it's OK to lower ourselves because our enemy is himself low. I'm not throwing blanket accusations of entire groups of people thinking this way mind you. I've just seen and read some people embrace this mindset.

Criminals will use any excuse for their actions. They murder for no other reason than that it makes them feel powerful in an unempowered society.

It's also refreshing to see the military deal with this in a swift and descisive manner. Still, there are a lot of unanswered questions of just how far up the OK to violate the Geneva Conventions went. I'm sure we'll get answers to that soon enough though. The torture of Iraqi prisoners (and prisoners in Guantanamo and Afghanistan) is not about our image in the world. It is about the dignity of human beings. Regardless of their crime. We are a nation of laws, not of vengance and retribution.

To read that we are now jailing the wives of suspected senior Baathist officials in hopes of coercing their husbands into providing information is unfathomable. That is guilt by association and it's been largely overshadowed by the prison abuse scandal. This runs completely counter to what we're supposed to stand for.

The U.S. government has taken us into a war that is justified as a God-given mission to bring freedom to the world, beginning with Iraq. Our qualifications for the mission are our high morals, exemplified, presumably, by the "spirit of the American people" often referred to by Bush. If we're to be taken seriously by the Arab world, we need to be true to our rhetoric.



Last edited by whomod; 2004-05-14 10:28 AM.