I’m skipping the stuff about Bullwinkle and getting right down to the “points”.
“The murder of Paul Johnson shows the evil nature of the enemy we face,” the President blustered. “These are barbaric people. There’s no justification whatsoever for his murder.”
“When I was a child,” she thundered, “we understood that different people have different cultures. My father used to read 1001 Arabian Nights to me. Do you remember that? ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’? Beheading is part of the Muslim culture.”
I nodded my understanding and explained to her that I had written an editorial expressing just those opinions last month for Strike The Root after the beheading death of American Nick Berg in Iraq .
“I’ll bet you got a lot of hate mail for that,” she laughed.
I did.
Just so there’s no mistaking his point, here’s the article he refers to. I’ll quote from it too.
“Beheading and stoning are acceptable forms of execution in Arabic cultures,” I explained. “It pisses me off when the media pundits in this country start calling the perpetrators ‘savage’ and ‘barbaric.’ It’s just a different culture.”
Yes. It is a different culture. A barbaric one.
I simply don’t understand why he seems to think that just because a culture is ‘different’ that we cannot criticise it.
He goes on, still trying to make some point that only shows that he really does not understand what we (the pro-war side) are saying.
What I have to explain now makes me feel like I’m playing Mr. Peabody to a collective group of Shermans . For every one of you who feel that Johnson and Berg’s execution by beheading was “savage” and “barbaric,” let me ask you one question: Do you know the derivation of the words “capital punishment”? The buzzer has already sounded and none of you have your hands in the air. It’s from the Latin capitis, meaning head. It has been an acceptable form of capital punishment for as long as man could sharpen an axe and figure out a fitting way to punish a transgressor. The only reason it was discontinued, except in modern jurisdictions subject to Islamic Sharia and by militant Islamists, was because of a fear that the severed head may in some cases continue to be alive and capable of feeling pain.
Precisely. Because we have, for the most part, renounced barbaric punishments. And to truly prove he doesn’t understand:
Yes, beheading is a ghastly bit of business and the deplorable pictures of Mr. Johnson’s headless body available all over the Web (Boy, did Drudge get those gruesome snapshots up on his web site but quick) are sickening. But do not, never mistake this act as the work of dark-skinned, “primitive” and “archaic savages.” When your mind starts to wander there, remember that last week, had she survived the Nazi holocaust, Anne Frank would have been 75 years old. She and millions of others were murdered in unspeakable ways by a culture not dissimilar to our own.
And the Nazis were murderous barbarians too. Not to mention monsters. The skin tone has nothing to do with it.
And he completely misses the one point about these beheadings that make them not ‘part of the culture’, as well as unIslamic. They were carried out on innocents who had not been condemned by a sharia court. Furthermore, the only similarity between the murder carried out by these barbaric sadists and a (still barbaric but not quite as sadistic) ‘Islamic’ beheading was that the head and body ended up separated. An executioner working for a sharia court who ‘beheaded’ someone in that manner would be (at best) immediately fired for incompetency.
All of this was found via a comment at Baldilock’s site
[update] In fact, I don’t think there is a word in the English language insulting enough to describe them. They booby trapped Kims body. Words fail.
7 Comments
The main point (that this guy missed) is that the people who were beheaded did NOTHING do deserve it. They were there just living their lives, working.
I guess this guy wouldn’t care if a terrorists cut his 2 year old daughter’s head off because, “Hey! It’s part of their culture!”
Pacifist prick. He obviously doesn’t understand what we are up against.
I sent the author a note, because I’m dumb like that. I’m eagerly awaiting his response to:
“Good lord, are you serious?
Do you really think that the “savage” component of these acts is merely the manner in which they were carried out? Or are you just being clever?
It’s great that you know some Latin. But the crucial point here is not etymological.
The savagery would exist if Johnson, Berg, and Pearl were placed on sterile gurneys, had their arms swabbed with alcohol before being given soporific injections of barbiturates and, once peacefully a-slumber, had their hearts stopped with injections of potassium chloride.
The point is that these people were guilty of nothing other than being non-Muslim and, in Pearl’s case, of the particularly heinous crime of being an American Jew. The “primitive, archaic mentality” was just as present among the lily-white European pretenders to Aryan domination as it is among the dark-skinned Muslim purveyors of Allah’s desert law of retribution.
The amoral nihilism that disguises itself as “cultural sensitivity” among today’s intelligentsia is just baffling, and more than a little repugnant.”
I am reminded of the story about the Indian explaining to the English officer that he must understand that Suttee, burning the widow alive atop her husbands funeral pyre, was a custom of long standing.
The officer responded that he fully understood, but the Indian must also understand that it was an English custom of equally long standing to hang anyone who did such an act.
personally…im a south korean, after seeing the video of Kim got beheaded, i really think that the US government and Korean goverment should no longer help those “EVILS” to rebuild their countries, if im the president, i will send troops and KILL EVERY IRAQI DEMONS! DONT FUKING CARE IF THEY ARE INNOCENT OR NOT, EYES FOR EYES, HEADS FOR HEADS! FULL SUPPORT OF EXTERMINATE IRAQI RACE!
Zarqawi, who is their leader, is not Iraqi. He comes from Jordan. I’m willing to bet most of the others are not Iraqi either.
Easycure and Ian made most of my points: it is not that they are beheading peoplr (the Guillotine was in use, I believe, until WWII, and compared favorably to the electric chair) but that they are doing so as criminal/terrorist acts.
I would add that it may be less “culture” differences that mean such methods are still in legitimate vogue as a combination of a sense of formality and of economics. One reason horrible punishments have been used throughout history (Europe used to hng people for a loaf of bread) has been, I think, sheer allocation of resources. If you are part of a struggling agrarian or nomadic/herding community, you may quite simply not be able (or, of course, willing) to support numbers of criminals in guarded jails.
Well, to some extent I made that point too, that the beheading was not legitmate even in a culture where that is considered a legitimate form of execution.
Your second point, on (talking now about ‘legitimate’) executions of that sort possibly being a matter of economics is a good one. Though there’s also the possibility of ‘work houses’ that England used for some time, IIRC. (And that hangs on some in the US in chain gangs.)
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The Moral Equivalence of Beheading
Rodger [sic] Jacobs has had an epiphany: Arab culture is different from ours! (The link between the two is not immediately clear from the post.) Ergo, they’re not barbarians. “Beheading and stoning are acceptable forms of execution in Arabi…
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