Beheading, prison abuses can't be linked

From The Toronto Sun by SALIM MANSUR

THIS WEEK'S videotaped beheading of Nick Berg, a 26-year old American civilian contractor, by al-Qaida-associated insurgents in Iraq is consistent with the practice of Muslim fascists -- as we saw in the murder of journalist Daniel Pearl in Karachi, in February 2002.

Only the misinformed, and those who wilfully dissemble facts, will concoct linkage between abuses in Abu Ghraib prison by American soldiers, and the ritual murder of a defenceless individual taped for broadcast to the world.

This is barbarism in full flight. And it has a lengthy, sordid history within the Arab-Muslim world.

We have seen images of such barbarity as in the ritual killings of veiled women in crowded public stadiums of Afghanistan under the Taliban, and the sadistic killing in public of Najibullah, the former Afghan leader, with his testicles removed and his orifices stuffed with cigarette stubs.

We see it in the cold-blooded murder of a eight-months- pregnant Israeli woman, Tali Hatuel, 34, and her four young daughters, by Palestinian jihadists in Gaza -- and, again in Gaza, in the desecration of the bodies of six Israeli soldiers killed in an explosion.

The fascism of those Muslims, sometimes abetted by power holders in the Arab-Muslim world, who victimized Muslims in Afghanistan or Pakistan without the world paying attention, has gone global.

The dissemblers of this history, and the ostrich-like lib-left crowd in the West, are in denial of what is at stake in the war on terror since 9/11.

But the outrage over abuses in Abu Ghraib, legitimate as it is, is also a backhanded admission that the rest of the world demands and expects from the United States a model of behaviour it is incapable of on its own.


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Bismarck, the iron chancellor of Germany in the 19th century, reputedly remarked that those fond of sausage also avoid seeing how it is prepared. The same applies for those living in a liberal democracy who disdainfully avoid knowing its history and requirements for its defence.

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The U.S. is not merely another country, or even another liberal democracy. It is the first-born of the great experiment in the political ideas of Enlightenment, a child of modernity itself in whose mature embrace rests the hopes of all those wanting individual rights and freedom for themselves.

This is why so much more is expected of Americans, and not of anyone else, and why the rebuke by those faulting America (who shed no tear for victims of Saddam Hussein) has been so exaggerated.