As news of Nick Berg's horrifying decapitation by Islamists reaches more and more Americans, I detect a shift in attitude. Radio commentators like Rush Limbaugh, Michael Medved, Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Prager, Sean Hannity, and others have been quietly irate today, and their callers are voicing fury at the entire Middle East. Newspapers are joining the call. For the first time in my memory, ordinary people are mentioning nuclear weapons as a possible response to the Islamist cancer infecting the world ... and they're not throwing in many caveats about protecting civilians and avoiding collateral damage.
That's sobering.
I don't think for a minute that President Bush is anywhere near considering the use of nukes in this war, thank God. But I think America is getting her back up again, with a seriousness not seen since 9/11. Average Americans have just seen an innocent countryman get his head sawed off by hooded Islamist goons, despite our media's reluctance to show any footage that paints Islam in an unflattering light. Combine that with our media's eagerness to splash pictures of the abuses at Abu Ghraib committed by a small segment of our soldiers, and the Democrats' and leftists' grandstanding accusations about our moral shortcomings being equivalent to the enemy's calculated evil ... well, the average American is quickly getting fed up.
Fed up with our delay in finishing this fight.
Americans are awake again. We're again reminded of who we're fighting and why, and we're again getting a grip on what's at stake. Lileks sums it up nicely:
Hugh Hewitt asked the big question tonight: of the world's billion-plus Muslims, how many support the butchers who hacked the head off the Pennsylvania contractor? One percent? Ten? Either number stands for a lot of people. I was walking Jasper Dog while listening to the show, and a few thoughts popped up.There are five reactions one could have to such acts, committed by a coreligionist: Endorsement, Indifference, Denial, Rejection, Participation.
Denial: I'm sure you've heard this before: "Islam is a religion of peace." But those people committed horrible violence in the name of Islam. "Then they are not true Muslims. No Muslim could do this." Rinse, repeat. It's the theological equivalent of putting your hands over your ears and humming loudly.
Rejection: This would be speaking out singly or in concert with fellow Muslims, denouncing the acts without making the entire peroration an elaborate plinth on which to place the word "BUT."
Indifference: I'm a Muslim in Indonesia. I work in a bank. I'm not particularly devout. I like a beer on a hot day, and you know what? They're all hot days. Some guys slit someone's throat in Iraq. I think that's wrong and I think that's stupid. And what do you expect me to do about it?
Endorsement: I'm not sure what constitutes endorsement -- silent pleasure among others not of the faith, chortling delight when you're with friends. Or perhaps nothing more than thanking Allah when you hear certain things have been done in Allah's name, and never acting or speaking a way that supports the jihadist's cause.
Participation. It's obvious what this means.
Here's the crux: of these five aspects, four assist the jihadists in one form or another, and the fifth -- Rejection -- all too often takes a passive form. Hugh had a Somali Muslim on his show from Minneapolis; they spoke for almost 40 minutes, and the guy's heart was in the right place. He sounded like a decent fellow. He said the Imam of his mosque regularly preached against the nutball Islamists. One hundred million more like him, please. But where are the rallies and marches outside the Saudi embassies demanding an end to funding extremism?
The Islamists have made a terrible mistake. They've again begun to unite us in revulsion for their savage and primitive aims, and they've underestimated the West's will to respond with terrifying violence. Some on the other side are beginning to realize they've overreached, but I'm starting to think it's too late to extinguish our anger.
The Islamists stuck their necks out by gambling on our reputation for self-restraint, and it's high time we decapitate them.
--
UPDATE: For information on the beheading of Paul Johnson ... click.
They didn't just kill him. They posed him, filmed him, decapitated him and uploaded the footage knowing we'd all see it within twenty-four hours. They sawed off Nick Berg's head and held it in front of a camera. It wasn't just an execution, it was a statement. A man's severed head was used as a prop. Somehow that made it worse for me when, acting against my own better judgment, I decided to watch the unedited video online.
The tension as the five men stood behind Berg was difficult to bear, knowing how horribly the vignette would end. Seeing him thrown down and brutalized was even more difficult. The plaintive screams, the pool of blood, the sawing across his neck and the ongoing chanting in the background revulsed me in a way I cannot explain. The one thing that stays with me the most, however, was seeing his lifeless head held in front of the camera and then to see it placed, I believe, on his corpse as the camera continued to roll. There was something unspeakably grotesque and unfathomably sad about his head being used to make a political argument.
Nick Berg's mutiliation and death continues to be used to make points, and that's what distresses me this morning. We are better than the murderous terrorists who executed the decapitation and I would never argue otherwise. But when it comes to holding that severed head in front of the camera, leaders and pundits are nearly as guilty as those who killed Nick Berg.
Yesterday I feared Nick Berg's murder would be trotted out as a reason to back the war on terror. I feared it would be used by others as a reason to reject the war. I worried it would be used to downplay the sadistic actions of Lynndie England and the other guards at Abu Ghraib and to attack those who sought to uncover that scandal. I worried Berg's murder would be held up as an example of what happens when you abuse prisoners. I thought we'd see a prizeless contest develop among analysts, pundits and politicians to see who could offer the most sincere condolences combined with most strongly expressed anger at the perpetrators of the killing.
I saw a group of incredibly evil men use a severed head in hopes of pushing their agenda. Now I see Americans doing the same thing. This morning I have read editorials and statements explaining that Nick Berg's legacy will be to strengthen our resolve for the war on terror--his demise reminds us of why we must fight. I have read others who tell me Nick Berg's death is symbolic of all the reasons the war on terror is doomed and how our currently policy merely encourages needless bloodshed. Articles claim Berg's killing shows us how little merit there is in attacks on U.S. treatment of prisoners. I've read more than one person explaining that the errors we made in Abu Ghraib killed Nick Berg and will kill others. Letters of condolence, jammed pack with rhetoric carefully designed to push agendas proliferates.
It's not surprising. News events create opportunities to promote agendas. The sum of those events are the evidence from which arguments regarding policy are constructed. Exploitation of particular singular incidents as jumping off points for larger generalizations, although guaranteed to maximize exposure and attention, often find themselves shakily supported.
It's surely hard to resist the urge to seize upon the "big story" when one wants to advance their position. I know everyone with an opinion wants to take Nick Berg's death and explain how it fits their worldview and how it makes the truth of their point clear. We are captivated by the cruelty, gore, and sadness. The audience is willing to hear how Nick Berg's murder proves one side right and another wrong. The opportunity to make political gain through his murder is there.
Taking advantage of that opportunity, however, is just what I do not need. I do not think it what others need, either. I'm not interested in seeing Nick Berg's head held up as a reason to stop the war, escalate the war, or anything else. When I watched that video, I was overcome by a profound sadness and feeling of helplessness. We have a war in Iraq that's contentious. We have prisoner scandals, rebel fighting, dead contractors, executions, occupation strategies, rebuilding problems, progress, setbacks, and more. It is all part of a larger puzzle that includes the World Trade Center, the U.S.S. Cole, the Munich Olympics, Quadaffi, culture wars, religious history and so many other things that trying to ingest it all seems almost impossible. Nick Berg's bloody decapitation does not clarify or crystallize the issues easily. To claim it does is to be the worst kind of exploiter. The kind of exploiter who waves a lifeless head in front of a camcorder.
If you are part of the print media, radio, television or the internet, I ask you not to use Nick Berg's death as "proof" for the correctness of your position. If you are a politician, aide, analyst or spokesperson, I ask you to forget we are in the middle of an election year and to remember that one is not required to reduce every event to a partisan talking point.
Nick Berg is dead. I saw them kill him on the internet. That gruesome scene didn't clarify, it didn't vindicate a position. It showed a murder and made me think about things like freedom, evil and war in a very human way. Perhaps it's possible to know about what happened, to see what happened, to let it have its profound personal impact and to move to looking for ways to create a world in which we will not have to see more heads dangled in front of cameras--literally or figuratively.