Posted on 09/05/2004 10:10:21 AM PDT by Pitiricus
PHOTOGRAPHED from above, the body bags look empty. They seem to lie flat on the ground, and it's only when you peer closer that you realise that that's because the bodies in them are too small to fill the length of the bags. They're children. Row upon row of dead children, more than a hundred of them, 150, more, many of them shot in the back as they tried to flee.
Flee from whom? Let's take three representative responses: "Guerillas", said The New York Times. "Chechen separatists", ventured the BBC, eventually settling for "hostage-takers". "Insurgents", said The Guardian's Isabel Hilton, hyper-rational to a fault: "Today's hostage-taking," she explained, "is more savage, born of the spread of asymmetrical warfare that pits small, weak and irregular forces against powerful military machines. No insurgent lives long if he fights such overwhelming force directly . . . If insurgent bullets cannot penetrate military armour, it makes little sense to shoot in that direction. Soft targets the unprotected, the innocent, the uninvolved become targets because they are available."
And then there was Adam Nicolson in London's Daily Telegraph, who filed one of those ornately anguished columns full of elevated, overwritten allusions each child was "a Pieta, the archetype of pity. Each is a Cordelia carried on at the end of Act V" and yet in a thousand words he's too busy honing his limpid imagery to confront the fact that this foul deed had perpetrators, never mind the identity of those perpetrators....
(Excerpt) Read more at theaustralian.news.com.au ...
"If you want your religion to be more than a diseased death cult, you're going to have to take a stand."
Looks like Mark Steyn's been reading your posts, Trav. $;-)
That, or it's just GMTA! $;-)
Steyn is right that Bush is the only world leader with a plan on the table to deal with the root cause.
Ping
PRETTY SOON, PEOPLE ARE NO LONGER GOING TO HAVE A PROBLEM CALLING IT "THE NEW CRUSADES".
I considered it a Crusade after 9/11.
They hide their faces and are afraid of "evil sexy" women, they like to rock back and forth waaay too much for my tastes, and they use the most innocent among us to protect themselves..
Read "The Haj" by Leon Uris, and you'll gain an insight into the mental illness that is Islam. Very young boys are routinely sexually assaulted by their parents. Incest is common. Everything that happens is "Allah's will" so why bother to better your situation?
Vote!
Bingo!
Thank you.
You're welcome Brian. And thank YOU for your tagline!
I don't want to carry water for the terrorists, but reading through all the reactions to the Beslan massacre, and especially all the anger over the MSM's blackout, a possibility occurred to me.
An observation frequently made is that the MSM is blacking out the Beslan massacre because it would focus attention upon the WOT and increase Bush's re-election chances. One possibility is that the MSM is not carrying stories showing the outrage of the moderate Muslim community because these stories also remind voters of the WOT. So the MSM could be blacking out cries of outrage from the overall Muslim community.
I had briefly considered advocating a total news blackout on terrorist attacks as much as possible, to deprive them of their complicit media accomplices and the exposure that is their force multiplier. That would perversely encourage them to mount big, splashy 9-11 style attacks of sufficient outrageousness that cannot be effectively silenced. This forces the terrorists into a position where they will be tempted to overplay their hand because it denies them smaller, more media tolerable attacks. I'm not sure we as a nation are willing to put up with that potential price, however.
Whoops...thanks for the correction.
Does anyone know if this little guy was alive? Breaks my heart.
We are sick to death of you and don't want to see you here, wearing your costumes. They are the swastika of our era.
Brilliant insight.
I live in Philly where I see these "costumes" continuously, and have a visceral reaction to them.
My ancestors didn't found this country in order that woman could be treated as non-persons !
Your description of them as the "swatiska of our era is remarkably insightful.
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