The torture-murder of Iraqi newswoman …

… Atwar Bahjat was taped by the murderers and is described in detail in the London Times. Wikipedia’s account of the initial seizure of Bahjat and her tv crew is better than the Times’. The fiends simply drove up to the spot where she had been broadcasting news reports near the Sammara mosque that had been blown up, firing their guns in the air and saying, “Where is the tv woman?” She cried to the crowd for help but the fiends fired more shots frightening them away and then they seized her and two of her crew, drove them away, and subjected them to a horrible death. Then at her funeral three days later, there were gun and bomb attacks on the funeral procession. This story is beyond my ability or will to comment on it.

But Robert Spencer and Michelle Malkin have comments on it. Spencer writes:

Anyone who thinks that God’s greatness is established by such acts of barbaric cruelty must be resisted at all costs. Yet those who hold to the same ideology, and who think that God Himself will grant Paradise to those who “kill and are killed” for Him (Qur’an 9:111), are streaming into Western countries, by the design and forethought of Western leaders, with no attempt whatsoever made to determine whether or not they approve of such slaughters and the ideology that motivates them.

This is insane.

To which Malkin adds:

Insanely evil.

I just want to point out that Michelle Malkin has called the Congress’s and President Bush’s Muslim immigration policies insanely evil.

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KE, a secular, pro-Western Turk, writes:

Whether the story about the tv reporter is a hoax or not, it is blood curdling all the same.

I’m no sissy when it comes to matters of blood, and I grew up in times when we saw military paratroopers fight with leftist guerillas with M-16s in our front yard, political factions using all sorts of violence on streets, etc. None of it has ever chilled me as much as this.

The ultimate test of any group’s character is how they deal with a member of another tribe when he/she is a captive in their hands and entirely helpless. Even shooting someone in the head is still more dignified since (1) your intent is to finish his life, not to inflict excruciating pain, and (2) a man shot in the head is still left bodily intact. Decapitation is something we do only to things like chicken these days, and even then in slaughter-houses. It is so cruel and atavistic.

In fact, I’d go so far as to claim that even the Saudi Arabian execution method of decapitation is still endurable given the facts that (1) it is performed very quickly by an expert executioner who finishes the job in split second, and (2) the person is basically a convict who’s received capital punishment—such as a murderer or rapist.

This, the slow and painful murdering with a knife of an innocent captive, this is beyond all human dignity. These animals deserve to be incinerated from a distance, like bugs and termites—not even to fight with; that would be dignifying them.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 08, 2006 01:05 AM | Send