Am I right or am I right?
Well done, Gobear for succumbing to emotion on cue and making the fatuous statement quoted above.
Not that I’m in favor of the war, but remember Daniel Pearl?
(Hijack: you gotta love 1010 WINS, who headlined their story on this, “Scoundrels!” I’m picturing them in the newsroom shouting out, “Blackguards! Caitiffs! Knaves! Scallywags! Mountebanks!”)
SCOUNDRELS? If I read that headline I’d suspect a couple of kids stole a lawn jockey.
Bite me. Daniel Pearl. The pregnant woman in Gaza. The dancing in celebration of 9/11. The adoration of Osama Bin Laden.
Soon we’ll see the reaction from crowds in many Arab nations. Let’s see how many celebrate this act and how many demonstrate against it.
C’mon man. :rolleyes:
You’re right on the mark, GOBEAR.
All those with Jewish-sounding names get out of Iraq right now!!
The bloodbath continues…
Oh god. I’m from West Chester, Pennsylvania. I think my brother went to high school with this guy.
But is GoBear correct? What is the general feeling among Arabs? I sure don’t see any Arab groups rushing to condemn people for cutting off the heads of Americans.
Kill a terrosist with a missle, outrage and condemnation! Cut off head of American prisoner, oh well, shit happens.
I’m not saying that Arabs don’t have good reason to hate us–our support of Sharon, the invasion of Iraq, the disgusting treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib–because clearly they have good cause to despise us. That doesn’t excuse in any way this vile act. The bastards who did this need to be caught and killed.
I’m not blaming all Arabs for the commssion of this murder because obviously only the people who wielded the knife are guilty. But it seems to me ridiculously Pollyannaish to pretend that we aren’t generally hated or that this act will not be applauded by the man in the Arab street.
Be realistic–much of the world, especially in the MENA region, hate America and its people.
After Abu Ghraib, do you really think anyone in the Arab world will regret this act?
Have you got any proof this young man was Jewish, aside from his last name?! Jesus H Wesley tap-dancin’ Christ, it’s bad enough this war is turning into a bloodbath on both sides without jumping at every opportunity to throw charges of anti-Semitism into the mix.
“We” didn’t bring this on “ourselves”, by any stretch of the imagination. Bush & Co. lied out their asses to get this war on Iraq, and they’re not paying the price. Working people on both sides, Iraqi and American, are. I am as disgusted by this beheading (which I haven’t even seen) as I am by this video of an Apache gunner blowing a clearly injured man to smithereens. (UK military personnel in the Gulf region have confirmed this tape as genuine, BTW.)
What really burns my ass, though, is this goddamn “one-up” game that’s being played - as if finding a worse atrocity committed by the other side when the cover is blown off your own will clean the bloodstains off your shirt, and somehow justify continuing whatever it is you’re doing. Nobody’s wearing the white hat in this one.
Bring 'em home. Bring 'em all home, civilian and military alike. Bring 'em home alive.
Perhaps there are some times when intelligent and rational people should just universally decry the act, unconditionally condemn the people committing the act, and join in remorse for another senseless loss of human life - without making their own stupid little political postures about “cause and effect” and “we deserved it” and “we pushed them into it” and “Bush is history’s greatest monster[sup]TM[/sup]”.
I guess that requires people to act intelligent and rational.
You’re right, that’s pure speculation on my part. I just wouldn’t be surprised if that were so, that’s all.
And if you think that anti-Jewish feeling isn’t the norm in the MENA, well, you might want to do some more reading.
I don’t think anyone is saying that at all. Certainly I’m not. I’m just a lot more cynical than most folks on how we are perceived.
If you’ll pardon the expression, amen.
A-motherfuckin’-men Olent
Before we get too hysterical, let’s remember the nature of partisan warfare. Reprisal murder is not, after all, unknown in the civilized West. Vendetta and revenge killing is not exclusively a Middle Eastern proclivity. They are going to lose people and we are going to lose people. This does not cloth us in the robes of righteousness.
We claim to do these things according to a set of rules that have historic and cultural roots. Many other cultures don’t observe those same rules. We have known that from the beginning. One of the justifications for the invasion was that Saddam did not play by the rules (albeit a justification that was raised pretty late in the justification / necessity formulating process). This does not mean that we should not be incensed by what happened to this man; but we should not be surprised either. It certainly doesn’t mean that we should abandon our precepts to play tit for tat. That just amounts to the abandonment of our principals and precepts and make us no better than them. I expect rage and sorrow. I don’t expect savagery from our side.
We are either people of principle or we are not. If we are not people of principle then what the Hell are we doing over there at all?
Hmm, who said that? Nobody here said that poor kid deserved to have his head hacked off with a knife. And it’s certainly true that this killing could easily have happened before the revelation of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib.
This murder should be decried, but you are far too intelligent to actually believe that this act exists in a vacuum entirely unrelated to the prevailing political climate.
And Bush isn’t history’s greatest monster, but he is an appallingly bad president.
Very true. It is going to be very interesting to see the next escalation.
I just found the video. I wasn’t exactly looking for it, but it came up in the IRC channel I frequent. I really wish I hadn’t watched it, now.
Do the Iraqis really want to be under a democracy? Or will they democratically decide they want a theocracy? It’s things like this that make me want to start drilling the hell out of the ANWR and completely remove all of our interests from the Middle East.
I think if we found our oil elsewhere, and convinced Israel to stop taking land from the Palestinians, things might be just a little less screwed up than they are now.
agreed, it was a barbaric act. wadr and all, however, I disagree that we should simply sit back and decry the act.
some of this was predictable. Christ some of us predicted it, didn’t want to see it happen, but suggested that some of this wasn’t well thought out for long term potential.
We invaded another country half the world away. we bombed their cities. took over their country. conducted raids into homes, detaining people, destroying property. Imprisoned people, and, apparently, subjected them to torture.
we also: Screamed bloody hell during the war when our prisoners of war were video taped, protesting abuse under the Geneva Convention.
Compare and contrast that sentiment to the reaction of some people here, Rush et al suggesting that the photos of the Iraqi prisoners naked and posed were no more than a college initiation.
There’s lessons to be learned here and simply sitting back and saying ‘that was a horrific act’ allow us to ignore the lessons.
lesson 1: do not invade a country w/o clear objectives, a clear exit strategy and only as a last resort to a clear and present danger.
lesson 2: do not attempt to skirt the Geneva Convention - they exist to protect all. The fact that we have detained people in GItmo specifically declaring to the world that the GEneva convention doesn’t apply to them shows that we’re capable of feeling ‘above the rules’.
lesson 3: insure that any prisoners you take are treated humanely. This allows you to avoid the horrific position that folks are in now of saying ‘ok, ok, so we were bad, but not as bad as that guy there’ - which historically has not ever (IME) been a good defense.
We did a series of stupid, stupid things. It’s possible that poor man may have been murdered even if we hadn’t but it certainly isn’t surprising that the situation is even more dangerous now than it was.
Just because your opponents descend into the abyss is no reason for you to follow.
And, as if on cue, gobear appears to add more fertilizer to an already abundent forest of hatred and violence based on a persons race. While I do not doubt the veracity of your statement, it is vitally important to remember that, just as there are Arabs who support terrorism, there are those who don’t. And just as there are Americans who commit atrocities against Arabs, there are those who don’t. But why bother making that point when generalizations and blind hatred is so much easier.