Friday, October 21, 2005
"Gouging, Raping and Beheading", Mused Miz Dowd, Casually Lighting A Cigarette, "But Certainly Not Curbing Womens' Rights".
This may seem old if only today's Drudgelines will do, but I had to go back and take a look at Clifford May's treatise on the antiwar media's intellectually scandalous take on Iraq and the War on Islamofascism. An excerpt:
The elite media fastidiously avoid such harsh words as "terrorist" – even to describe those who, last week, rounded up five Iraqi teachers from outside their school, dragged them into a classroom, lined them up against a wall and shot them to death...
Is it possible that these veteran journalists don't know that Saddam Hussein murdered – according to Human Rights Watch – 300,000 Iraqis? Among those butchered were both men and “comparatively liberated” women. Children, too, by the way.
Kenneth M. Pollack, who served on the National Security Council under President Clinton, has noted that Saddam would “gouge out the eyes of children to force confessions from their parents and grandparents …drag in a man's wife, daughter, or other female relative and repeatedly rape her in front of him. ...behead a young mother in the street in front of her house and children because her husband was suspected of opposing the regime."
Do commentators such as Ms. Dowd believe that such acts did not “curb” women's rights? Would the Post argue that gouging, raping and beheading don't qualify as “lawlessness”? Alternatively, would they contend that barbarism in pursuit of stability is justifiable? If so, why not propose the U.S. military adopt such tactics? And why cavil about Abu Ghraib?
For decades, too many correspondents covering the Middle East failed to report Saddam's worst atrocities – sometimes because they knew little beyond what the dictator's flacks told them, sometimes to protect their local staffs, sometimes to avoid getting kicked out of the country or tossed into jail themselves.
But what can be the excuse for so many media heavyweights continuing the cover-up now -- overlooking documented history, soft-peddling the murder of innocents by Saddam loyalists and al-Qaeda invaders, and shifting blame from terrorists to those fighting them?
This isn't neutrality. It's moral vacuity.
They are their professed heroes' worst enemies, and our enemies' best friends. They refer to the murderers of Beslan children and Iraqi schoolteachers as "gunmen", protecting them from that they fear most: the truth of Islamofascism.
The elite media fastidiously avoid such harsh words as "terrorist" – even to describe those who, last week, rounded up five Iraqi teachers from outside their school, dragged them into a classroom, lined them up against a wall and shot them to death...
Is it possible that these veteran journalists don't know that Saddam Hussein murdered – according to Human Rights Watch – 300,000 Iraqis? Among those butchered were both men and “comparatively liberated” women. Children, too, by the way.
Kenneth M. Pollack, who served on the National Security Council under President Clinton, has noted that Saddam would “gouge out the eyes of children to force confessions from their parents and grandparents …drag in a man's wife, daughter, or other female relative and repeatedly rape her in front of him. ...behead a young mother in the street in front of her house and children because her husband was suspected of opposing the regime."
Do commentators such as Ms. Dowd believe that such acts did not “curb” women's rights? Would the Post argue that gouging, raping and beheading don't qualify as “lawlessness”? Alternatively, would they contend that barbarism in pursuit of stability is justifiable? If so, why not propose the U.S. military adopt such tactics? And why cavil about Abu Ghraib?
For decades, too many correspondents covering the Middle East failed to report Saddam's worst atrocities – sometimes because they knew little beyond what the dictator's flacks told them, sometimes to protect their local staffs, sometimes to avoid getting kicked out of the country or tossed into jail themselves.
But what can be the excuse for so many media heavyweights continuing the cover-up now -- overlooking documented history, soft-peddling the murder of innocents by Saddam loyalists and al-Qaeda invaders, and shifting blame from terrorists to those fighting them?
This isn't neutrality. It's moral vacuity.
They are their professed heroes' worst enemies, and our enemies' best friends. They refer to the murderers of Beslan children and Iraqi schoolteachers as "gunmen", protecting them from that they fear most: the truth of Islamofascism.
