June 29, 2004

Again with the beheadings

As I was running out to the store this morning, I had Mike Gallagher's show on, and he was discussing this Marine that had been captured and threatened with beheading. He was wondering how we, as a country, would react to the beheading of a soldier, comparing it with cop-killing criminals. He and the callers I heard seemed to be in favor of "stepping up" our efforts in the middle east to help stop the terrorists responsible, just as police forces tend to step up their efforts after one of their own is killed.

The thing I have to wonder about is what more we can do. The problem is that their method is simple and easy to execute. Kidnap someone--it doesn't really matter who--videotape them, threaten to behead them unless their demands are met, wait, then kill them. Anyone can do this; I mean, if I wanted to, I could pull off something like this. You don't need a huge army; you just need a couple of big guys, a big knife, and a videocamera. And the address to Al-Jazeera.

The only thing I've heard that might be effective is my dad's solution: Bomb al-Jazeera. If the terrorists have no one to publish their videos, then they'll quit making them.

Posted by Blog Jones at June 29, 2004 12:55 AM | Category: Politics

Comments

on the other hand its reacting that they want, then they can point and say "look at the devil what he does to us... squawk squawk..."

its fun to talk about nuking and napalm and round-ups and tit-for-tat but it won't work, its what they want, and no American President will do it. Plus we shouldn't.

When the Russians shot down a commercial jetliner over the eastern soviet union when Ronald Reagan was President, everyone held their breath expecting us to fire off something or other - but Reagan (in his wisdom) held his fire and said to his aides "no... the world will judge them."

sorry to say, we don't have that kind of creativity in place right now. But we have not - and I don't think have ever - played this angle at all in that part of the world.

too bad.

Posted by: Boileryard Clarke at June 30, 2004 08:03 PM

You're right about how they'd react, I know. Bombing al-Jazeera is not a real solution. But, supposing we could bribe them into not showing any more beheadings....

Posted by: Blog Jones at June 30, 2004 08:53 PM

Additionally, watch the excellent documentary Control Room and you'll see people describing al-Jazeera as both pro-Al Qaeda *and* pro-Bush - so they must be a little more objective than we'd like to believe.

To a certain extent, the Arab media simply have a habit of showing much more violent footage than we're used to - but they show violence against *both* sides. We Westerners just don't have the stomach for it.

Which isn't to say they're totally unbiased, but they're no more biased than, say Fox News.

Posted by: Bob at July 1, 2004 03:24 PM

Having said all that, I don't mean to infer they should have shown the beheadings.

Also, those were uploaded to websites by the terrorists.

Posted by: Bob at July 1, 2004 03:26 PM

Bob: Doh! That's right. Forgot about the websites. (It's what I get for writing about something I don't follow very closely.)

Posted by: Blog Jones at July 1, 2004 09:41 PM
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