A rchive Date
[ 13-05-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Toronto/Salim_Mansur/2004/05/13/457209.html
Beheading, prison abuses can't be linked
By SALIM MANSUR - For the Toronto Sun
Thu, May 13, 2004
THIS WEEK'S videotaped beheading of Nick Berg, a 26-year old American civilian contractor, by al-Qaida-associated insurgents in Iraq is consistent with the practice of Muslim fascists - as we saw in the murder of journalist Daniel Pearl in Karachi, in February 2002.
Only the misinformed, and those who wilfully dissemble facts, will concoct linkage between abuses in Abu Ghraib prison by American soldiers, and the ritual murder of a defenceless individual taped for broadcast to the world.
This is barbarism in full flight. And it has a lengthy, sordid history within the Arab-Muslim world.
We have seen images of such barbarity as in the ritual killings of veiled women in crowded public stadiums of Afghanistan under the Taliban, and the sadistic killing in public of Najibullah, the former Afghan leader, with his testicles removed and his orifices stuffed with cigarette stubs.
We see it in the cold-blooded murder of a eight-months- pregnant Israeli woman, Tali Hatuel, 34, and her four young daughters, by Palestinian jihadists in Gaza - and, again in Gaza, in the desecration of the bodies of six Israeli soldiers killed in an explosion.
The fascism of those Muslims, sometimes abetted by power holders in the Arab-Muslim world, who victimized Muslims in Afghanistan or Pakistan without the world paying attention, has gone global.
The dissemblers of this history, and the ostrich-like lib-left crowd in the West, are in denial of what is at stake in the war on terror since 9/11.
But the outrage over abuses in Abu Ghraib, legitimate as it is, is also a backhanded admission that the rest of the world demands and expects from the United States a model of behaviour it is incapable of on its own.
It may well be that the American public may decide to throw in the towel on Iraq and the war on terror, un-elect the sitting president, push a new president to set the pace for isolationist policies, outsource America's responsibilities for peace, security and development to the United Nations, and turn within itself - while enemies of freedom and civilization dance to the noise of their cult of nihilism and death.
Then again, the same American public, presented with pictures of smoke and debris from Ground Zero in New York and those from Abu Ghraib, may decide there are inevitable costs in defeating enemies of civilization, and stay the course with the present administration.
Bismarck, the iron chancellor of Germany in the 19th century, reputedly remarked that those fond of sausage also avoid seeing how it is prepared. The same applies for those living in a liberal democracy who disdainfully avoid knowing its history and requirements for its defence.
Those living under various types of dictatorships can be excused for their limited understanding or ignorance of what constitutes a liberal democracy, with its fine balance between individual rights and the requirements of security.
But citizens of a liberal democracy cannot be excused for refusing to understand how delicately balanced such a political system is, how great has been the cost of its making, and to what length its enemies are willing to go to destroy it.
The U.S. is not merely another country, or even another liberal democracy. It is the first-born of the great experiment in the political ideas of Enlightenment, a child of modernity itself in whose mature embrace rests the hopes of all those wanting individual rights and freedom for themselves.
This is why so much more is expected of Americans, and not of anyone else, and why the rebuke by those faulting America (who shed no tear for victims of Saddam Hussein) has been so exaggerated.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Thursdays.
He can be reached at: smansurca@yahoo.ca
Letters to the editor should be sent to: editor@tor.sunpub.com Home Page
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