Friday, October 21, 2005
Good Sense From An Unusual Source
As seen at Instapundit and NRO (but without their overly-flip headline):
"When the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke, there was not a single Arab who did not express the opinion that it was a despicable, mean [act] contrary to humanist values. They are right about this. But these people swiftly forgot their humanism and sealed their lips when the Jordanian terrorist Abu Mus'ab Al-Zarqawi declared war against the Shi'ites in Iraq, and began to dispatch his booby-trapped soldiers to blow themselves up among children, women, and the elderly. None of those [who denounced the Abu Ghraib scandal] uttered a word and none shed a tear for the hundreds and thousands of Iraqis being murdered and whose bodies are being mutilated.The author is Omran Salman, a Bahraini journalist living in the U.S. Please note that he is not afraid to call a terrorist by name.
"The first to denounce [the Abu Ghraib scandal] were the Americans themselves, who thought that the acts of some of their soldiers distorted the image of the U.S. and served as a mark of shame...
"But don't the Arabs feel an even greater sense of shame when some of them kill and massacre Iraqi citizens? Don't the rest [of the people] feel pangs of conscience when they try to come up with excuses and justifications for the murderers and criminals whom they call the 'resistance?' How can someone outraged at the torture of or disrespect for another person be silent and ignore [Al-Zarqawi's] declaration of the [program of] extermination of millions of people because of their sectarian affiliation?
Even more remarkable:
"The war being waged by the Al-Qaeda organization and the terrorists against the Shi'ites in Iraq is among the acts of collective extermination, which is rare in modern history. There has been no case in the past in which somebody has declared a similar war against a race or a group as a whole, except [for the case of] Nazi Germany against the Jews...Think about that for a moment. A Muslim journalist, favorably comparing Iraqi Shi'ites to Jews, in print. Now that takes guts. ("Speaking truth to power", anyone?)
By all means, check out the whole thing (in translation) at MEMRI.
UPDATE: On a distantly-related topic, Saddam Hussein's trial has started... and promptly halted, at request of defense counsel. (It will resume again in early November.) Saddam has clearly lost none of his bluster; he stood defiant, did his best to intimidate the judge and the court, and physically struggled with his police escort.
Personally, I'm just as glad that he's being tried by Iraqis; no one knows better than they what this man has done. I'm also glad to see that they seem willing to take their time. (The trial of Eichmann, as I recently had occasion to remind myself, lasted over two years.)
Cox & Forkum seem to agree:
