I've watched the video of the brutal beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It's a very disturbing thing to see, and I won't provide a link. You can find it if you really want to see it. But I will link to his father's Wall Street Journal op-ed piece about the seventh anniversary of his death:
This week marks the seventh anniversary of the murder of our son, former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. My wife Ruth and I wonder: Would Danny have believed that today's world emerged after his tragedy?
The answer does not come easily. Danny was an optimist, a true believer in the goodness of mankind. Yet he was also a realist, and would not let idealism bend the harshness of facts.
Neither he, nor the millions who were shocked by his murder, could have possibly predicted that seven years later his abductor, Omar Saeed Sheikh, according to several South Asian reports, would be planning terror acts from the safety of a Pakistani jail. Or that his murderer, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, now in Guantanamo, would proudly boast of his murder in a military tribunal in March 2007 to the cheers of sympathetic jihadi supporters. Or that this ideology of barbarism would be celebrated in European and American universities, fueling rally after rally for Hamas, Hezbollah and other heroes of "the resistance." Or that another kidnapped young man, Israeli Gilad Shalit, would spend his 950th day of captivity with no Red Cross visitation while world leaders seriously debate whether his kidnappers deserve international recognition.
No. Those around the world who mourned for Danny in 2002 genuinely hoped that Danny's murder would be a turning point in the history of man's inhumanity to man, and that the targeting of innocents to transmit political messages would quickly become, like slavery and human sacrifice, an embarrassing relic of a bygone era.
But somehow, barbarism, often cloaked in the language of "resistance," has gained acceptance in the most elite circles of our society. The words "war on terror" cannot be uttered today without fear of offense. Civilized society, so it seems, is so numbed by violence that it has lost its gift to be disgusted by evil.
Read. The. Whole. Thing. Mourn for Danny Pearl. And ask yourself what's going to happen to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed when Guantanamo is closed.
Seven years ago today, barbarians with box cutters — primitive savages who could never build a World Trade Center or a 747, but whose insane ideology is dedicated to making the building of such things impossible — murdered 2,996 innocent people in pursuit of their war against Western Civilization.
Never forget that on September 10, 2001, Manhattan looked like this.
Never forget that on September 11, 2001, Manhattan looked like this.
Never forget that we watched people jump from hundred-story buildings to avoid an even worse fate.
Never forget that we were wounded, but our spirit wasn’t broken. We’ve fought back. And we will win.
As I have each of the last two September 11ths, I offer you passage from Gerard Van der Leun’s Of a Fire in a Field — a passage that moves me beyond words every time I read it — in which he recalled 9/11 and its aftermath, when he lived in New York:
Inside the wire under the hole in the sky was, in time, a growing hole in the ground as the rubble was cleared away and, after many months, the last fire was put out. Often at first, but with slowly diminishing frequency, all the work to clear out the rubble and the wreckage would come to a halt.
The machinery would be shut down and it would become quiet. Across the site, tools would be laid down and the workers would straighten up and stand still. Then, from somewhere in the pile or the pit, a group of men would emerge carrying a stretcher covered with an American flag and holding, if they were fortunate, a body. If they were not so fortunate the flag covering over the stretcher would be lumpy, holding only portions of a body from which, across the river on the Jersey shore, a forensic lab would try to make an identification and then pass on to the victim’s survivors something that they could bury.
I’m not sure anymore about the final count, but I am pretty sure that most families, in the end, got nothing. Their loved ones had all gone into the smoke and the dust that covered the end of the island and blew, mostly, across the river into Brooklyn where I lived. What happened to most of the three thousand killed by the animals on that day? It is simple and ghastly. We breathed them until the rains came and washed clean what would never be clean again.
. . .
Read the whole thing — and think about the question he asks you at the end.
September 11 is the seventh anniversary of the worst attack ever on U.S. soil, when many of us finally realized that a dangerous and implacable enemy had declared war on us years earlier and wasn’t kidding.
September 11 is the seventh anniversary of the day that we watched in horror as people fell a hundred stories to the pavement and the skyline of Manhattan changed in a matter of hours.
September 11 is the seventh anniversary of the day that 2,996 innocent people were murdered by a small band of fanatical Islamofascists, and the world changed forever.
Today, March 8, is International Women's Day. To celebrate, a German-based organization calling itself "Anonymous Group of Democratic and Free Thinking" (yeah, their English translations are less than perfect) has stepped up a guerilla campaign that actually began last year — the veiling of public statues and sculptures of women in order to call attention to a growing threat to women's rights in Europe:
The aim of the campaign is to refer to the creeping Islamisation endangering the European idea of UNITY IN DIVERSITY and other similar cultural achievements of the liberal thinking world. Particularly, the phenomenom that Muslim women wear increasingly Burqa or headscarfs, is a visible expression of the challenge and threat to our liberal societies with their values such as women´s rights, democracy, liberal and secular thinking.
With this campaign, we would like to increase public awareness of our liberal values and to advocate them. The liberal achievements such as equal rights of men and women, individual freedom, Human Rights, and the dignity of each individual are no negotiable values! We would like to point out that substantial and partly irreconcilable differences exist between the Muslim and the liberal thinking world.
What a terrific idea! In the last couple of days, these brave human rights activists have veiled public statues of women in Berlin, Braunschweig, Dortmund, and Düsseldorf, Germany, in Helsinki, Tampere, and Turku, Finland, and in Moscow, Russia.
The group's press release, even in awkward English translation, made clear their uncompromising commitment to the universality of human rights (emphasis in original):
… It is not racist to point out these issues, it is racist to keep ourselves from protecting and advocating the rights of the women in the Muslim world, whether they live in foreign countries or in ours. So, where are the women’s rights activists who used to stand up for women’s rights for the Western women in the our world? There is no reason and no need to leave these Muslim women alone without help in sight.
We would like to compare two quotes, one is taken from the Declaration of Human Rights and one is chosen from the Quran in order to show where the substantial differences are:
… "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." …
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, United Nations, Art. 1
… "To those (women) on whose part you fear desertion, admonish them, and leave them alone in the sleeping-places and beat them." …
Quran, Sura 4,34
On this International Women's Day, I celebrate and applaud the anonymous human rights advocates throughout Europe who are participating in this campaign to challenge and reject the atrocious, barbaric 7th-century ideology that already dominates the Middle East and is trying to extend its control across Europe and eventually the entire globe. I'm only sorry that they consider it necessary to remain anonymous.
Remember the "Five Ws" of journalism — who, what, when, where, why? Apparently, they don't at the Associated Press. Here's an AP story about an anti-Semitic attack in France — see if you think there are a couple of Ws missing:
PARIS — Six people kidnapped and tortured a Jewish teenager by punching and kicking him and writing "dirty Jew" on his forehead, judicial officials said Wednesday.
The 19-year-old victim met with his six alleged attackers, who ranged in age from 17 to 28, in the Paris suburb of Bagneux to try to settle an argument about a missing cell phone and camcorder, officials from the prosecutor's office in Nanterre said. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.
They said the six held the victim for about nine hours, taunted him for being Jewish, and said he was gay. They allegedly forced him to eat cigarette butts and scrawled anti-Semitic and anti-homosexual insults on his forehead.
A gang of youths who use the phrase "dirty Jew" — I wonder who they might be and why they might believe that Jews are by nature dirty.
The victim, whose identity has not been released, suffered slight injuries.
The alleged attackers have been detained and investigators filed preliminary charges against them. The preliminary charges include committing "acts of torture or barbarism" and "kidnapping by a gang," the judicial officials said.
The Bagneux City Hall said in a statement that officials were "shocked and outraged" by the attack. The suburb was the site of a 2006 attack against another young French Jew, Ilan Halimi, who was kidnapped, tortured and killed by a gang.
So this is a Paris suburb where a gang of youths previously attacked and killed a Jew. Hmm, I wonder if it's one of those suburbs where gangs of otherwise-unidentified youths routinely burn cars and attack police patrols.
The president one of France's leading Jewish organizations, the Representative Council of Jewish Organizations in France, said anti-Semitic attacks in the nation were down 30 percent last year. But Richard Prasquier said the new attack suggests that "anti-Semitic prejudice is still very present."
The head of an organization that tallies anti-Semitic crimes in France, the BNVCA, said many recent victims, including the 19-year-old in last month's attack, were not religious Jews and had little connection with the Jewish community.
"The fact of having a Jewish name was enough for these aggressors to identify him as one, and to harass him," Sammy Ghozlan said.
France has western Europe's largest population of Jews and Muslims. The nation faced a surge in anti-Semitic crime starting in 2000 after tensions between Israelis and Palestinians flared up in the Middle East.
Aha, finally in the tenth paragraph, there's a soupçon of a hint regarding what might be the nature and motive of the gangs of youths who attack Jews in France.
Once, Zimbabwe was the "breadbasket" of Africa and one of the world's major exporters of food. Now, there is virtually no agricultural production — virtually no production of anything, other than fiat money (the inflation rate is Weimar-like) and hunger. Soon, all the wildlife will be gone, and then the famine will become really serious (emphasis added):
"Wild animals have become the latest victim of this economic crisis," Johnny Rodrigues, chairman of the Zimbabwe conservation task force, told the London Telegraph.
"We are getting reports from all over the country about an increasing number of baby elephants, buffalo and other animals being killed or injured in snares."
Such is living in Zimbabwe, where food shortages due to President Robert Mugabe's malfeasance have become chronic. His policy of forced land redistribution over the past seven years has left the economy in shambles and has nearly wiped out wildlife on former private game ranches that were seized from their owners.
Hungry Zimbabweans have killed off 90% of the animals on those ranches, National Geographic reports, while 60% of the country's entire wildlife population has been slaughtered for food.
Zimbabwe is in ruins. It's been in a downward spiral for more than a decade. Mugabe's anti-market economic policies, particularly the seizure of private property, have been disastrous.
Most of the property owners who knew how to make economically profitable use of the land have been evicted.
Consequently, Zimbabwe's economy has declined by 35% to 40% since 2000. It will shrink another 5.7% this year and 3.6% next year, according to International Monetary Fund projections. Unemployment has now reached 80% and inflation is at 7,000% (though some independent estimates say it's more like 14,000%). Eight in 10 Zimbabweans live in absolute poverty.
There's no telling how many bodies are buried in the slums Mugabe bulldozed, or how many have been murdered by the looters and thugs Mugabe has encouraged, or how many have died already from lack of food, clean water, and health care. But pretty soon, the bodies will really begin to pile up. How many times does history have to repeat itself before the people of Africa — and those in the West who claim to care about them — acknowledge that authoritarian, kleptocratic socialism is harmful to human beings and other living things?
Maybe if PETA organizes protests against the Mugabe regime …
I WASN’T PLANNING ON POSTING A 9/11 reminiscence today. I wrote a lot of them back in the day, and I didn’t think I had anything fresh to say. Whatever I wrote today about 9/11 was going to stay between me and my hard drive. Then a few hours ago I got a letter from a Cantor Fitzgerald employee. It brought back memories of the day. Suddenly saying nothing about 9/11, especially on a day when so many Senators are talking about al Qaeda as part of a lame attempt to score partisan political points, seemed inappropriate.
Commentators and pundits have been pondering the meaning of al Qaeda's horrific truck bomb attacks in far northern, peaceful, Iraqi Kurdistan. What prompted them to attack a small, isolated ethnic group, far from U.S. troops, the surge, and disputed territory? Most missed the point.
This attack wasn't aimed at the Yazidis, or at the Kurdistan region, or even at the government of Iraq. It was aimed squarely at NBC, ABC, CBS, and the United States Congress. The Yazidi villages were just a convenient, low-risk target on which to unleash the maximum possible carnage. The reason for killing hundreds of Yazidis is to shock and dismay Americans. Expect more such "media events" between now and September 15.
Today's column by Ralph Peters addresses the issue well (emphasis added):
The victims were ethnic Kurd Yazidis, members of a minor sect with pre-Islamic roots. Muslim extremists condemn them (wrongly) as devil worshippers. The Yazidis live on the fringes of society.
That's one of the two reasons al Qaeda targeted those settlements: The terrorist leaders realize now that the carnage they wrought on fellow Muslims backfired, turning once-sympathetic Sunni Arabs against them. The fanatics calculated that Iraqis wouldn't care much about the Yazidis. …
But the second reason for those dramatic bombings was that al Qaeda needs to portray Iraq as a continuing failure of U.S. policy. Those dead and maimed Yazidis were just props: The intended audience was Congress.
Al Qaeda has been badly battered. It's lost top leaders and thousands of cadres. Even more painful for the Islamists, they've lost ground among the people of Iraq, including former allies. Iraqis got a good taste of al Qaeda. Now they're spitting it out.
The foreign terrorists slaughtering the innocent recognize that their only remaining hope of pulling off a come-from-way-behind win is to convince your senator and your congressman or -woman that it's politically expedient to hand a default victory to a defeated al Qaeda.
Peters goes on to explain that, barring the triumph of the "peace at any price" crowd here at home, and despite the likelihood of more massive bloodshed in the near term, the Petraeus plan is working well and the longer-term outlook in Iraq is pretty good. Read the whole thing.
The Islamofascists in general and al Qaeda in particular are masters of media manipulation and propaganda (the founders of the movement learned at the side of the Nazis). They're also keen students of history, and they know all about the 1968 Tet offensive, in which Viet Cong forces were defeated and decimated at every turn, but won a huge victory on the public relations front, leading Walter Cronkite to declare Vietnam a failure and destroying public support for the conflict.
Will al Qaeda be able to replicate Tet? I don't think so. For one thing, the media environment has changed, and we no longer rely on a Walter Cronkite to tell us "that's the way it is." Hardly anyone watches the Katie Courics and Keith Olbermans today. And in any case, if they try to paint an al Qaeda Tet as a tremendous defeat for the U.S., the new media will quickly counter with evidence to the contrary.
If you want to know how things are going in the battle for Baquba and Diyala province, you need to read Michael Yon's dispatches from the front lines. Yon is no Pollyanna. He's frank about American blunders in this war, he spoke of civil war as early as 2005, and he thinks we face a difficult task in trying to turn things around. But he thinks now we're doing some things right, and al Qaeda is doing many things wrong. The massive operation to clean al Qaeda out of Diyala is a case in point.
Start with Be Not Afraid, written before Operation Arrowhead Ripper began. It provides important background information, including Yon's encounters with and assessment of Gen. Petraeus, and an excellent description of the political situation in Iraq. Then read the three dispatches (so far) about the operation:
That last one, filed on the 25th, includes some harsh criticism of the local government and police in Baquba and Diyala. But it also includes some fascinating information about why more and more Iraqis are turning against al Qaeda and cooperating with the Americans and with rival Iraqi sects and factions (emphasis added):
Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) had tarnished its name here by publicly attacking and murdering children, videotaping beheadings, all while imposing harsh punishments on Iraqi civilians found guilty of violating morality laws prohibiting activities like smoking. The AQI installed Sharia court had sanctioned the amputation of the two "smoking fingers" for those who violated anti-smoking laws. …
On the evening of the 24th I spoke with a local Iraqi official, Colonel Faik, who said the Muftis would order the severance of the two fingers used to hold a cigarette for any Iraqis caught smoking. Other reports, from here in Diyala and also in Anbar, allege that smokers are murdered by AQI. Most Iraqis smoke and this particular prohibition appeared to have earned the ire of many locals. After an American unit cleared an apartment complex on the 23rd, LTC Smiley, the battalion commander, reported that residents didn't ask for food and water, but cigarettes. In other parts of Baqubah, people have been celebrating the routing of AQI by lighting up and smoking cigarettes.
Other AQI edicts included beatings for men who refused to grow beards, and corporal punishments for obscene sexual suggestiveness, defined by such "loose" behavior as carrying tomatoes and cucumbers in the same bag. These fatwas were not eagerly embraced by most Iraqi…
And I thought the anti-smoking nazis here were getting out of hand!
Michael Yon has been called the Ernie Pyle of this war. His dispatches are always gritty, riveting, thoughtful, and informative, and they're frequently illustrated with wonderful photographs. Michael Yon : Online Magazine is an example of independent journalism at its finest — his work is supported entirely by contributions and sales of books and photos. Drop by there from time to time, and if you think what he's doing is worthwhile, drop him an "attaboy" or kick in a few bucks to support his efforts — it'll be greatly appreciated.
Today is the eighteenth anniversary of China's massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. I can't believe it's been that long ago. Gateway Pundit remembered, and has pictures and links.
If you're young and/or just don't remember the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, the revolution was, for a time, televised. Watch this short (1:12) YouTube video — it captures one of the bravest and most powerfully moving acts by a lone individual that you'll ever see.
Last week, I commented on a German judge's ruling that the Koran gives a Muslim man the right to beat his wife. A few days earlier, I noted LGF's post on the "camel caravan" rule for Muslim schoolgirls' participation in field trips. A loyal reader recently emailed me about a long piece in Germany's Der Spiegel ("The Mirror") about these and related issues. It's entitled "Paving the Way to a Muslim Parallel Society." I've finally read all eight parts, and I highly recommend it. Here's the "executive summary":
A recent ruling in Germany by a judge who cited the Koran underscores the dilemma the country faces in reconciling Western values with a growing immigrant population. A disturbing number of rulings are helping to create a parallel Muslim world in Germany that is welcoming to Islamic fundamentalists.
Some of the evidence cited for this claim involves matters of headscarves, field trips, and swimming lessons. But some of it is much more grim:
In 2005, Hatun Sürücü, a young Berlin woman, was killed because she was "living like a German." In her family's opinion, this was a crime only her death could expiate. Her youngest brother executed her by shooting her several times, point blank, at a Berlin bus stop. But because prosecutors were unable to prove that the family council had planned the act, only the killer himself could be tried for murder and, because he was underage, he was given a reduced sentence. The rest of the family left the courtroom in high spirits, and the father rewarded the convicted boy with a watch.
Beatings and honor killings, often excused or treated leniently by the courts, are a growing problem in Germany. Even the apparently more innocuous matters supposedly involving "choice," like the field trip, swimming, and other female modesty issues, conceal the vicious reality: the "choices" being exercised aren't the apparent desire of the Muslim women and girls to be modest, they're the Muslim men's desire to subjugate and control their wives and daughters, treating them like property. Germany's women's shelters are increasingly seeing Muslim women and girls fleeing arranged marriages, slave-like living conditions, and savage beatings:
Ayten Köse, 42, who manages a shelter in the Neukölln Rollberg district, tries to help. She doesn't resemble most of the Muslim women here. Instead of a headscarf, she wears her hair uncovered. Köse knows how difficult it is for Muslim women in Germany to be courageous and rebel. …
The problem for many women, says Köse, is that they are completely alone, alone against their own family or their husband's family. "And if they haven't attended school in Germany," Köse explains, "they usually don't even know about human rights."
Besides the human rights issues, there are other lesser public policy implications for the mulitculturalists' acquiescence to a parallel Muslim society. Germany's massive social welfare system can ill afford some of the consequences:
In another letter from Absurdistan, the Federal Ministry for Social Affairs issued the following announcement to German health insurance agencies in the summer of 2004: "Polygamous marriages must be recognized if they are legal under the laws of the native country of the individuals in question."
What the policy statement boiled down to was this: In certain cases Muslim men from countries where polygamy is legal — like Morocco, Algeria and Saudi Arabia — could add a second wife to their government health insurance policies without having to pay an additional premium.
Read it, please. All eight parts. The Germans have a head start on us, but this is where we're headed, too, if CAIR and the like have their way.
Newt Gingrich's March 26 column is about the people historian William Manchester called "the men of Munich" and their modern-day counterparts:
The news report came about mid-week. Maybe you saw it.
The Associated Press reported that terrorists in Iraq have passed an unthinkable threshold: They used two children to disguise a car bomb.
The car was waved through a checkpoint by American soldiers who could not imagine that children would be in a car filled with explosives. When the terrorists got to their target, they got out of the car and ran. They left the children behind in the car, and then blew it up.
There is a word for people who put children in a car to be blown up. The word is evil.
When I travel around the country speaking to groups of Americans, I often tell the story of a couple arrested last year in Great Britain. They were arrested on the suspicion that they were going to use their eight-month-old baby to smuggle a bomb onto an airplane. They were apparently going to disguise the bomb as baby food. And they were perfectly happy to kill their baby just as long as they killed some Americans in the process.
There is a word for people like this. The word is evil.
It's important that we say this out loud and that we render this moral judgment. Because if we fail to understand that our enemy is evil, we have failed to understand what we are fighting.
We are not used to adversaries who will kill young children — even their own children — just to get a chance to kill us. But we had better get used to it, because this is the level of seriousness in the threat we face — this is the level of its ferocity.
And yet I wonder if some of us are still not prepared to recognize and confront the evil of our enemies.
The rest is about what Gingrich calls "a suicidal inability to come to grips with evil." Go. Read.
The enlightened intelligentsia, the sensitive liberals, the sophisticated Europeans, the journalists whose goal is to make this a better world — they all agree that we unenlightened American yahoos need to be less judgmental and more understanding of the grievances of the radical Islamists, that we need to be willing to talk with them, to negotiate and search for common ground. That we need to temper our hostility, abate our anger, abandon our adversarial stance, and ask ourselves and them, "Can't we all just get along?"
Yesterday, Little Green Footballs pointed out this AFP story that further illuminates the nature of the enemy with whom we're supposed to reconcile. In case you missed it:
Insurgents in Iraq detonated an explosives-rigged vehicle with two children in the back seat after US soldiers let it through a Baghdad checkpoint over the weekend, a senior US military official said Tuesday.
The vehicle was stopped at the checkpoint but was allowed through when soldiers saw the children in the back, said Major General Michael Barbero of the Pentagon's Joint Staff.
"Children in the back seat lowered suspicion. We let it move through. They parked the vehicle, and the adults ran out and detonated it with the children in the back," Barbero said.
The general said it was the first time he had seen a report of insurgents using children in suicide bombings. But he said Al-Qaeda in Iraq is changing tactics in response to the tighter controls around the city.
They parked the vehicle between a market and a school. The explosion was relatively small, really. It only injured seven and killed five. Including the two children, of course.
No, we can't understand. Or talk. Or find common ground. Or get along. There is nothing to negotiate and no middle ground. Is that clear?
Khalid Sheik Mohammed seemed to be especially proud of one particular atrocity:
"I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan," Mohammed is quoted as saying in a transcript of a military hearing at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, released by the Pentagon.
"For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head," he added.
There are indeed. In fact, the video is readily available. Should you watch it? Jeff Jacoby addressed that difficult question at the time:
June 13, 2002 — The video of Daniel Pearl's beheading is searing and nightmarish, but the key to its power is not that it shows him dead. It is that it shows him alive. You look into his eyes, you hear his voice, you all but smell his fear as he tells the camera what his captors are forcing him to say.
"My name is Daniel Pearl. I'm a Jewish American from… Encino, California, USA. I come from, on my father's side, a family of Zionists. My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I'm Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We've made numerous family visits to Israel…"
The three-minute video is a piece of Islamist pornography: A frightened Jew — even better, a frightened American Jew — confesses his Jewish roots and denounces US foreign policy. Then his head is cut off and brandished triumphantly as English words scroll up the screen: "And if our demands are not met, this scene shall be repeated again and again."
When CBS aired the first part of that video, Pearl's mother was outraged. Jacoby acknowledged the family's pain, but saw things differently:
Who cannot understand her fury and anguish? Whose heart doesn't go out to the devastated young widow, whose infant son will never know his father?
And yet this video, depraved and evil as it is, does something for Daniel Pearl that has been done for virtually none of Al Qaeda's other victims: It makes him real. It allows him to be seen as a flesh-and-blood human being, a guy with a face and a voice and a house in Encino. Countless Americans who never knew him in life will experience Pearl's death as a sickening kick in the gut. His murder is an atrocity they will take personally — because they will have seen it with their own eyes.
Islamist terrorists butchered more than 3,000 innocent men, women, and children last Sept. 11. And before them there had been more than a thousand other victims — in the Marine barracks in Beirut, on Pan Am 103, in the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, at the Khobar Towers barracks, in the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, on board the USS Cole. Yet who, their families and friends excepted, knows what any of them looked like? Who remembers any of their names?
The Pearl family's ire is understandable. But I wonder if it isn't the loved ones of all the other victims who have the better reason to be angry. …
There are times when no good purpose is served by publicizing a terrible image. The repeated broadcast of race car driver Dale Earnhardt's fatal crash last year was gratuitous. Nothing was gained by replaying, over and over, the beating of Rodney King.
But the beheading of Daniel Pearl is different. It conveys with a force no words can match the undiluted malignancy, the sheer evil, of the enemy we are fighting. Yes, it is a horror. Yes, it is barbaric. But we are at war with barbarians, and what they did to Pearl, they would gladly do to any one of us. This is no time to be covering our eyes.
I won't tell you that you should watch the video. It's pretty awful. Maybe you don't need to in order to fully appreciate who and what Khalid Sheik Mohammed is. But if you're one of those who feels sympathy for the man or worries about him being robbed of his humanity — well, I hope you do watch. So you can see that he wasn't robbed of his humanity — he rejected it.
In early November, I posted quite a rant regarding a news story about an Ethiopian immigrant convicted of female genital mutilation. A regular reader gently informed me offline that it’s an African thing, not Islamic. It’s a valid point — the custom is practiced by non-Islamic Africans and probably predates Islam.
But I wasn’t ready to believe that the practice had nothing to do with Islam. I vaguely remembered some evidence to the contrary (including references in hadith). And then there’s the distinctive attitude toward women that’s a hallmark of Muslim culture, which suggests that this barbaric practice would be readily embraced in Islamic societies. Back in November, I sarcastically put it this way:
Khalid Adem could be a Southern Baptist, a Unitarian, a Jew, a Buddhist, a Hindu, or maybe a Wiccan… After all, it’s not as if there’s some particular faith or culture in which men are taught that women are inherently dirty and inferior, that they must be completely subjugated and treated like farm animals, and that they offend God if they express themselves, exercise free will, or experience pleasure.
It seems my suspicions were justified. A heavily-footnoted article in The Middle East Quarterly entitled "Is Female Genital Mutilation an Islamic Problem?" persuasively argued that FGM is quite widespread in Middle Eastern societies and is believed by many — including many Muslim clerics and scholars — to be either required by the Qur’an, or at least condoned or approved:
… Religion is not only theology but also practice. And the practice is widespread throughout the Middle East. Many diplomats, international organization workers, and Arabists argue that the problem is localized to North Africa or sub-Saharan Africa,[4] but they are wrong. The problem is pervasive throughout the Levant, the Fertile Crescent, and the Arabian Peninsula, and among many immigrants to the West from these countries. Silence on the issue is less reflective of the absence of the problem than insufficient freedom for feminists and independent civil society to raise the issue.
The authors present evidence from a study in the Garmian region of Iraqi Kurdistan that found a mutilation rate of nearly 60%. They argue that rates in other countries of the region are likely as high or higher, but the societies are too closed and repressive for the evidence to come to light (emphasis added):
… That diplomats and international aid workers do not detect FGM in other societies also should not suggest that the problem does not exist. After all, FGM was prevalent in Iraqi Kurdistan for years but went undetected by the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and many other international NGOs in the region. Perhaps the most important factor enabling an NGO to uncover FGM in Iraqi Kurdistan was the existence of civil society structures and popular demand for individual rights. Such conditions simply do not exist in Syria, Saudi Arabia, or even the West Bank and Gaza where local authorities fight to constrain individual freedoms rather than promote them.
But the problem is not only that autocratic regimes tend to suppress the truth. There also must be someone in place to conduct surveys. Prior to Iraq’s liberation, it was impossible to undertake independent surveys on issues such as malnutrition and infant mortality. Saddam Hussein’s regime preferred to supply data to the U.N. rather than to enable others to collect their own data which might not support the conclusions the Baathist regime desired to show. The oft-cited 1999 UNICEF study claiming that U.N. sanctions had led to the deaths of 500,000 children was based on figures supplied by Saddam’s regime, not an independent survey.[31] The U.N. undertook its first reliable statistical research on the living conditions in Iraq only after liberation.[32] Syrian, Saudi, and Iranian authorities simply do not let NGOs operate without restriction, especially when they deal with sensitive social issues.
As if our own selfish interest in weakening the enemies of Western Civilization weren’t enough, here is yet another good reason for us to promote freedom, human rights, and open societies in the Middle East.
What a terrific idea! In the last couple of days, these brave human rights activists have veiled public statues of women in Berlin, Braunschweig, Dortmund, and Düsseldorf, Germany, in Helsinki, Tampere, and Turku, Finland, and in Moscow, Russia. 