An excellent piece by Mr. Prager. I have not often agreed with his positions on issues, but he is on the money on this one. I thank Mr. Auster for showing it here.

“Islamic ritual murder.” Accuracy, at last.

The latest column by Thomas Sowell addresses some of the same concerns about the feckless world news media, as well as the private grief of the Berg family being made public: http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20040518.shtml

I agree with Dennis Prager’s broad point — a large segment of the mainstream press has thrown its weight, not just against the war but behind the resistance. On the other hand, I’m confused by the example he cites.

If Zarqawi says, “This murder is our response to Abu Ghraib,” — and he does say it — reporting that, even reporting it at face value isn’t the same as asserting moral equivalence in the reporter’s own voice.

Al-Tawhid has killed non-combatants in Iraq before, even relief workers from the UN and the Red Cross. But they never made an example of one in quite this way before. They’ve descended to new depths of atrocity for a reason. What is it? Under what circumstances can we reasonably expect them to descend further? Questions like that aren’t treason. Simplifying the terrorists’ motivations to, “They do evil things because they are evil,” might be true but it’s not enough. It’s not useful information.

One insight I got talking to jihadis in Pakistan and Afghanistan is that there’s a huge gap between what they want to be and what they are, and they know it and they’re frustrated by it. They want to be a defensive force. They want to be able to protect their people from atrocities like the Bosnian ethnic cleansing, the Chechen filtration camps and the Algerian dirty war. They don’t have the ability to do this. They don’t have the numbers or the technology. They’ve taken on the responsiblity and they can’t deliver. All they can do is make committing atrocities against Muslims as painful and expensive as possible.

Mr. Hechtman is in denial over the reality of deep human evil. Here it takes the form of a perfunctory acknowledgement that the broadcast ritual butchery of Berg was evil, but Mr. Hechtman denies that this is “useful information,” and like a good liberal proceeds immediately to a speculation on possible rational motives for such monstrous deeds. The poor jihadis are frustrated over their inability to help fellow muslims elsewhere. This reminds me of those liberals who, equally unable to confront the reality of human evil in another context, make excuses for the Palestinian suicide bombings of innocent civilians: “they have no other way to fight.”

Mr. Hechtman, the murderers in Iraq have in fact told us why they are doing what they are doing, in the form of a private letter of Zarqawi to Al Qaeda colleagues, a letter he did not expect us to see. Read the McCarthy piece on the Zarqawi letter here:
http://www.nationalreview.com/mccarthy/mccarthy200405180830.asp

They do these things as a tactic to try to mobilize defeatist and pacifist sentiment in the United States to win a war, as was done with Viet Nam, and prevent the establishment of a new Iraq run by Iraqis not sympathetic to their atavistic fanatical goals.

Liberals are heir to the shallow and childishly optimistic Enlightenment view of man and of the human condition, a view in apposition to the tragic or classic view, which sees man as deeply flawed and prone to doing evil. Those with this unconstrained optimistic view of man, (“noble savage,” “blank slate,” etc.) consider vicious acts as some sort of aberration, brought about by frustration, lack of education or understanding, etc. They believe that addressing “legitimate grievances” is the means to resolve all conflict. They do not see conflict as normal and endemic to the human condition. Much less do they imagine there are such things as dedicated enemies, who cling to murderous intent for reasons that meet deep psychological needs, needs in some cases more important to them than life itself, and who are completely intractable to reason. Therefore, they cling desperately to the nation that such atrocities are to be met with negotiation, propitiation, appeals to reason, and rationally designed “peace processes,” involving “confidence building measures,” etc.

For Mr. Hechtman, “useful information” is that which would help with the foregoing processes. In reality, the useful information liberals need is that which would enable them to distinguish between situations in which adjustments and comporomises could reasonably be expected to work, and those in which they are completely misguided. But the ability to make such distinctions would mean they were liberals no longer.

The reality is that in this world, we have certain fanatical enemies who must be destroyed, period. Remember the statement of the Hamas member: “We don’t want something from you, we want to kill you.” With respect to liberals, he might as well have had his head out the window. Such a statement simply remains unheard, because it can not be reconciled with the liberal view of man (except by such processes as outlined above, which effectively deny the reality of the situation). I believe this is why nobody in the liberal West paid any attention to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, even though he set out there everything he would proceed to try to accomplish.

Thucydides wrote more than I’m going to quote inline. Please refer to his post of 12:18.

“Rational motives” is giving the terrorists too much credit. Will you settle for “predictable” or “internally consistent”?

Also, I’m not so sure that groups like Al Qaeda and Al Tawhid care all that much what unbelievers think, not nearly as much as the Vietnamese communists did. The best analogy I’ve heard is that they think of unbelievers as having the mental capacity of rabid dogs. After all, if we had the capacity for rational thought, we wouldn’t be unbelievers. My take is that the Berg video was for the benefit of their own audience — not for ours. The message was, “We’re not powerless. We got one of theirs.”

There are parts of the Iraqi resistance that do care about public opinion in the United States. The connections and communications between the domestic Sunni mujahideen, Sadrists and Baathists and the antiwar movement here are already closer than anything that existed during Vietnam and they’re going to get closer still in the near future. The foreign Wahabis are not part of that so-called “unholy alliance”. It’s worth pointing out that every Iraqi resistance group that actually has any knowledge and experience in manipulating American public opinion has denounced the Berg murder in the strongest possible terms.

For the record, the possibilities for negotiation with groups like Al Qaeda are zero. They’re guided by the Azzam Doctrine, named after Bin Laden’s former boss and mentor. It says that evil cannot be negotiated with or bargained with or compromised with. It can only be fought.

I’ll water down what I said earlier. To say that they do evil things because they are evil is not *sufficient* information. It has no predictive power. I’m not saying “A justifies B” or even “A causes B”. All I’m saying is that it’s a good bet A will be followed by B. There’s never a good time for contractors with Israeli-stamped passports to be wandering alone around Baghdad, but there are bad times and worse times.

You didn’t need to excuse or condone or sympathize with Hamas to recognize two patterns over three years of the intifada and even before. After the assassination of a leader, there would be a suicide bombing and when civilian casualties since the last suicide bombing passed about a hundred or so, there would be another suicide bombing. A lot of Israelis would avoid outdoor crowds in the week after an assassination, simply because they were playing the odds.

I am no lover of the news media, but it seems to me that there was fair amount of indignation seeped through their coverage. I may be prejudiced as a steady viewer of WCBS-TV local news in NYC, which may be saner than average.Their reporter, Lou Young, looked actually angry and upset when covering the Berg story.
As ever,
Alan

There is one shocking thing about the treatment of Berg’s murder that has gone unremarked: namely, that not just the news media, but Bush 41.1 have described it as an “execution!” This is a classic specimen of the degradation of standards and language.

The media’s use of terms like “execution” and “beheading” are deliberate distortions so that some sort of moral equivalence can be implied.

Dennis Prager’s description of this atrocity as “slaughter” is much more accurate.

I think the use of the term “execution” is used here not to equate the terrorists to law enforcement, but rather to equate them with the mafia or organized crime.
“Execution” is often used to describe gangland killings, and I thought the intent was to portray the terrorists who beheaded Berg as thugs rather than law enforcement.

Michael Jose is unfortunately right in saying that “execution” has often been used to describe organized crime killings…. just an earlier stage in the degradation of standards (and anticapital punishment propaganda.)