The Mirror of Fallujah (Victor Davis Hanson is mad as hell and not going to take it any more!)

VDH ^ | April 4, 2004 | Victor Davis Hanson

[quidnunc]

No more passes and excuses for the Middle East

What are we to make of scenes from the eighth-century in Fallujah? Random murder, mutilation of the dead, dismemberment, televised gore, and pride in stringing up the charred corpses of those who sought to bring food to the hungry? Perhaps we can shrug and say all this is the wage of Saddam Hussein and the thirty years of brutality of his Baathists that institutionalized such barbarity? Or was the carnage the dying scream of Baathist hold-outs intent on shocking the Western world at home watching it live? We could speculate for hours.

Yet I fear that we have not seen anything new. Flip through the newspaper and the stories are as depressing as they are monotonous: bombs in Spain; fiery clerics promising death in England, even as explosive devices are uncovered in France. In-between accounts of bombings in Iraq, we get the normal murdering in Israel, and daily assassination in Pakistan, Turkey, Morocco, and Chechnya. Murder, dismemberment, torture — these all seem to be the acceptable tools of Islamic fundamentalism and condoned as part of justifiable Middle East rage. Sheik Yassin is called a poor crippled “holy man” who ordered the deaths of hundreds, as revered in the Arab World for his mass murder as Jerry Falwell is condemned in the West for his occasional slipshod slur about Muslims.

Yet the hourly killing is perhaps not merely the wages of autocracy, but part of a larger grotesquery of Islamic fundamentalism on display. The Taliban strung up infidels from construction cranes and watched, like Romans of old, gory stoning and decapitations in soccer stadiums built with UN largess. In the last two years, Palestinian mobs have torn apart Israeli soldiers, lynched their own, wired children with suicide bombing vests, and machine-gunned down women and children — between sickening scenes of smearing themselves with the blood of “martyrs.” Very few Arab intellectuals or holy men have condemned such viciousness.

Daniel Pearl had his head cut off on tape; an American diplomat was riddled with bullets in Jordan. Or should we turn to Lebanon and gaze at the work of Hezbollah — its posters of decapitated Israeli soldiers proudly on display? Some will interject that the Saudis are not to be forgotten — whose religious police recently allowed trapped school girls to be incinerated rather than have them leave the flaming building unescorted, engage in public amputations, and behead adulteresses. But Mr. Assad erased from memory the entire town of Hama. And why pick on Saddam Hussein, when earlier Mr. Nasser, heartthrob to the Arab masses, gassed Yemenis? The Middle-East coffee houses cry about the creation of Israel and the refugees on the West Bank only to snicker that almost 1,000,000 Jews were ethnically cleansed from the Arab world.

And then there is the rhetoric. Where else in the world do mainstream newspapers talk of Jews as the children of pigs and apes? And how many wacky Christian or Hindu fundamentalists advocate about the mass murder of Jews or promise death to the infidel? Does a Western leader begin his peroration with “O evil infidel” or does Mr. Sharon talk of “virgins” and “blood-stained martyrs?”

-snip-

[RonDog]

From victorhanson.com:

April 17: Book Signing - Fresno, CA Fig Garden Bookstore - 1 - 3pm - Between War & Peace

Victor Davis Hansen (LIVE) in FRESNO ping!

[Enterprise]

"But in the meantime, we should have no illusions about the enormity of our task, where every positive effort will be met with violence, fury, hypocrisy, and ingratitude."

It has to be said again, that in general, conservatives do understand this. Liberals haven't a clue. Their understanding is limited to hoping Bush fails so they can reclaim power.

[CGVet58]

a while back, Pat Robertson interviewed a former Arab muslim now turned Christian who said the same thing. IIRC, his words were, " in studying islam & Christianity, you can make the case that the Christian Messiah is the muslim's AntiChrist, and the Mahdi is the Christian AntiChrist..." or words to that effect.

Interesting confluence, eh?

CGVet58

[Lion in Winter]

This guy ought to see the pictures of what happened to 35 Christian Churches and 8 Chrisitian Serbians in Kosovo in mid-March of this year. All the stuff was done by albanian members of the religion of peace(tm).

Why, those muslims even dug up Christian graves on the Church grounds and threw the remains all around. Some Danish soldiers told their media from back home, that they themselves were THROWING-UP while witnessing such heinous activity.

All of this grave desecration was being done while the soldiers were being fire-bombed by raving mobs of Albanians who were attacking them and the Serbian civilians who had taken refuge in the Church building.

What nice and civilized muslims clinton delivered Kosovo to. Get my meaning?

Marmema and destro have more info on all this than I do. Perhaps they can tell us more?

[Lion in Winter]

BTTT

[Lion in Winter]

Please read my comments in a post just prior to this one.

[JCG]

So the question remains did Saddam create Fallujah or Fallujah Saddam?

Davis gets close to the answer several times in this piece but just can't or won't say it. Fact is, Islam created them both.

America's Fifth Column ... watch PBS documentary JIHAD! In America
http://12thman.us/media/jihad.rm (Requires RealPlayer)

Who is Steve Emerson?

[Enterprise]

Thanks for the heads up. I am pretty sure I will make it, and I will bring at least one friend!

[hershey]

Words fail me. V.D. Hanson absolutely wonderful yet again. '...grotesquery of Islamic fundamentalism on display', his pointing out that in the Middle East, grown men waste hours in coffee shops, fingering worry beads and complaining about their lot in life, while westerners are in their sixth hour on the job, and on and on. V.D. Hanson. Fascinating read everytime.

[Enterprise]

"Islamists are the only group that condones sex with children as long as they are hairless."

As disgusting as NAMBLA.

[spodefly]

And then there is the asymmetry of it all. Walk in hushed tones by a mosque in Iraq, yet storm and desecrate the Church of the Nativity in the West Bank with impunity. Blow up and assassinate Westerners with unconcern; yet scream that Muslims are being questioned about immigration status in New York. Damn the West as you try to immigrate there; try to give the Middle East a fair shake while you prefer never to visit such a place. Threaten with death and fatwa any speaker or writer who “impugns” Islam, demand from Western intellectuals condemnation of any Christians who speak blasphemously of the Koran.

BTTT

[boris]

"The solution to this mess is to allow Israel greater leeway to reconquer much of the Arab world, and drive the Mahometan filth into the desert wastelands."

I have advocated (quite seriously) placing an embargo against the entire Islamic world. NO trade of any kind. No travel. All visas revoked. No more western medicine, technology, satellites, communications. Any vessels and aircraft violating a cordon to be destroyed.

In a matter of decades they would be flea-bitten nomads wandering the desert again.

Oil?

The answer is nuclear power and methane clathrates.

--Boris

[Gritty]

Thanks for posting the entire article. Quidnunc has an annoying habit of unnecessary excerpting.

This is Hanson at his best. He sounds like he has finally had it with Islamic excuses. Now, if only the rest of the West would be the same way.

[dirtbiker]

The answer is nuclear power and methane clathrates.

.....along with drilling in ANWAR and off-shore, building more refineries, and to hell with the Arabs, the enviro-wackos, and their leftist ilk. If they want $3.00/gal gas, let them present their loony-leftist card at the pump and pay it; let the rest of the country enjoys $1.00/gal gas.

The largest finds of oil are in Alaska and off-shore in the Gulf of Mexico, there is NO good reason we are not going after it.........

[backhoe]

The answer is nuclear power and methane clathrates. .....along with drilling in ANWAR and off-shore, building more refineries, and to hell with the Arabs, the enviro-wackos, and their leftist ilk. If they want $3.00/gal gas, let them present their loony-leftist card at the pump and pay it; let the rest of the country enjoys $1.00/gal gas. The largest finds of oil are in Alaska and off-shore in the Gulf of Mexico, there is NO good reason we are not going after it.........

I agree absolutely, with no reservations. There is no excuse ( other than politics ) for us not producing our own energy- we have it in spades, we just need to go get it.

[VOA]

How the heck is VDH still teaching?

I suspect it's because he's at CSU-Fresno (IIRC). Thus he's in a locale of California
that still has a bit of down-home conservatism (from the descendants of the Okies/Texans
and other dust-bowl refugees; and not all the Hispanic influx is liberal.

A recent profile article on Hanson included some whining from an English PhD who
complained that Hanson and some other conservative faculty members had caused
him (the English brat) to not get tenure.

And IIRC, Hanson is now contemplating ending his teaching career and
moving to a new house he's built in a mountain-area of CA, partly due to increases
in crime in his home area.

[Ben Chad]

We don't allow rabid dogs to roam the streets, and so it should be with the tribal death cult of Islam.

Paging Atticus Finch

[Ben Chad]

ROP BUMP

[VMI70]

bump