Editorial

[tlspiegel -Closed]

Not putting link because tomorrow the Editorial will be different. This was published today in The East Valley Tribune.

East Valley Tribune.com - Thursday, June 24, 2004
Tribune Editorials

Ghastly ritual of beheadings shows world is under attack by barbarism

That they have done it again is no surprise.

We have come to expect of them the most barbaric, the most vile, the most inhuman of conduct. And the most cowardly: In the atrocious videos they so proudly spread on the Internet, these warriors of Allah cannot summon the courage to show their own faces.

They did it again on Tuesday, beheading an innocent man whose pitiful pleas for mercy and deliverance were broadcast over the weekend in an effort to weaken the resolve of those hoping to restore some semblance of civilization to Iraq. They did it again even though they first hinted it might be possible to negotiate his release.

Thus, Kim Sun-il joins Daniel Pearl and Paul Johnson and Nick Berg, who likewise have been beheaded in the fanatical Islamist crusade against humanity and civilization. He joins every Israeli victim of every suicide bomb, everyone ever blown up in a hijacking perpetrated in Allah’s name. He joins the 3,000 who died on our shores that dreadful late-summer day not yet three years ago, and the hundreds slaughtered in attacks in Moscow, and the scores blasted to bits in Bali and Madrid and Beirut and Istanbul.

It is perhaps time to acknowledge in frank and honest terms just what is going on here. The Western world — that is, a world of modernity, of tolerance, of science, of discovery — is under attack by an enemy that is the antithesis of all those things. It is not, as President Bush has so euphemistically expressed it since Sept. 11, 2001, a “war on terror.”

Terror is but the weapon of the real enemy, and the real enemy is the fanatical, jihadist wing of Islam. Bush’s credibility would rise, by the way, were he to summon the courage to say as much.

It is a religious war, the most dangerous kind. It is already a long one, and we have been slow to catch on. We had early glimpses more than a generation ago, in the butchery at the 1972 Olympics in Munich and in various bloody hijackings. It has since gone on apace, decade after decade, outrage after outrage, until the present moment when it appears the jihadists are bidding for no less than the control of Iraq and of Saudi Arabia, and for weapons as fearsome as the human mind can conjure.

What they would hope to do with those weapons is clear. They would hope to cow and terrorize the world into submission to the kind of subhuman tyranny they imposed on Afghanistan until that unfortunate land was wrested from their grasp.

That aim was articulated most recently just Wednesday in a recording purportedly made by Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, currently the leading terrorist in Iraq. He threatened to kill interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and fight ‘‘until Islamic rule is back on Earth.”

That his dream of some bygone Islamist paradise is hallucinatory does not make it any less dangerous. The world’s most perilous moments of the past century came at the hands of those who envisioned paradise for themselves and their kind — and **** for everyone else.

This is nothing less than a seminal moment in the history of the world, and the very least we can do is pay attention and stop the mindless bickering that is taking our eye off the ball.

With regard to paying attention, it is of note that the No. 2 Internet search phrase of the past week, after “Paul Johnson,” was “Paris Hilton.” “Britney Spears” was not far behind. Could many of us, ill-served by a pandering and celebrity-crazed media, be missing the true import of our times?

And with regard to the partisan bickering, no better example emerges than the movie “Fahrenheit 9/11,” an anti-Bush film that is either being hailed or excoriated depending on whether red or blue is the critic’s color of choice. Knee-jerk reactions to the movie abound, even among those who have not seen it. Another example lies in the dispute over whether the Sept. 11 commission has or has not supported Bush’s assertion of links between al-Qaida and the deposed Saddam Hussein. It might be best for everyone to just put aside their preconceived notions and look at the facts, which are much more nuanced than many partisans would let on.

The facts also are chilling. Whether the war in Iraq was justified, whether its aftermath has been wisely handled, who gave the orders that allowed Abu Ghraib to become a U.S.-run torture chamber, the veracity and competence of the Bush administration — those are questions of no small consequence. But they miss the larger point: We are in a potentially decisive struggle against an enemy whose depredations til now are but a shadow of the horrors it will gleefully inflict if it ever has the means.

Bush was criticized when, a couple weeks back, he likened the current struggle to World War II. And in a sense, the criticism may have been warranted. The current war, albeit global in scale and against an innumerable and ruthless foe, may not be like World War II at all.

It may be bigger than that.

[prism68]

Chilling article. Correct, though.

[bobbcat]

It may be bigger than that.

I don't think it is far fetched at all to consider this struggle with this enemy "WW III."