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-

[risk]

Angry but with no specific sugestions ping - not sure what VDH is proposing here. The Belmont Club in Response at Fallujah offers more practicable advice.

[aloysius89]

Ya think? (sarcasm)

[aloysius89]

I second the motion.

[Irene Adler]

Wow. Very powerful analysis culminating in a disturbing question.

[PGalt]

Thanks for this post. Outstanding article!

[Brian Allen]

<< quidnunc has an annoying habit of unnecessary excerpting. >>

Hasn't it though?

It seems to be a form of obsessive-compulsive passive aggression by way of which that patently self-absorbed pseudo-psychopath attracts a little attention and from which apparently derives some small satisfaction.

A bit like those similarly anti-social creeps who block the nation's fast lanes at two miles per hour under its speed limits -- the self-appointed speed-limit police.

Every manifestation of pathological loneliness is pathetic, though -- and poor quiddy provides no exception.

[PGalt]

and thanks for your full post!

[SJackson]

If you'd like to be on or off this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.

[SJackson]

Thanks for the ping

[SJackson]

If you'd like to be on or off this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.

[Travis McGee]

Islam is an insane murder cult, from Mad Mo until today.

We're going to find out, sooner or later, if Abdul will pray, to a glowing crater.

[varon]

bump

[Travis McGee]

Powerful truth from Victor Davis Hanson!

The enemy of the Middle East is not the West so much as modernism itself and the humiliation that accrues when millions themselves are nursed by fantasies, hypocrisies, and conspiracies to explain their own failures. Quite simply, any society in which citizens owe their allegiance to the tribe rather than the nation, do not believe in democracy enough to institute it, shun female intellectual contributions, allow polygamy, insist on patriarchy, institutionalize religious persecution, ignore family planning, expect endemic corruption, tolerate honor killings, see no need to vote, and define knowledge as mastery of the Koran is deeply pathological.

[Coroner]

Do you have a link about the hairless children. That would be great ammo for me to use!!

[Travis McGee]

All true.

[TASMANIANRED]

I don't have anything specific to lay my hands on this moment.

Right after the fall of the shah of Iran. Komeini (sp) published a book that was translated into english. I nearly vomited reading it. There was an entire chapter devoted to the things that were and weren't appropriate to have sex with. Ducks are on the list, dogs and pig are off. I am fairly sure that this was my source.

Jamie Glaznov one of the contributing writers at Horowitz's site ( Front Page) has several lenghty articles about the depraved sexual proclivities in Islam. Just go to columnists and select him. There are a couple of years of articles.

[Blood of Tyrants]

I think that it is time to remind them what shock and awe is all about with about 5000 dead Iraqis.

[risk]

Another prescient one from wretchard: Mordor -- for archy's ping list.

According to this view, the Left desires, not a Gramscian extinction but power above anything else. The power to regulate all aspects of human existence, all human relations, all cultural attitudes, all state authority. And while the Left might make temporary alliance with the Jihadis, the attainment of ultimate power requires an eventual liquidation of the Jihad. There is only room for one scorpion in a bottle.

[TASMANIANRED]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=246

read this one... He has about 6 lenghty articles regarding sexuality in Islamic cultures.

[Slings and Arrows]

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