Atwar Bahjat
296 words.
(See Atwar Bahjat, Revision 2 above.)
UPDATE: As soon as I hit Submit to post this, I read that the video mentioned below is a hoax. Sort of. It’s not Atwar Bahjat, at least. It was, however, a Nepalese man killed in August 2004.
Malkin’s been annoying me lately, but newsworthy items like this keep me from deleting her from my RSS reader: The Execution Of Atwar Bahjat. Anyone tempted to feel sorry for Iraqi insurgents and the people who harbor them should read that.
The death of Atwar Bahjat, a popular female Iraqi television reporter murdered while covering the Golden Mosque bombing, got only cursory media coverage at the time. (I remember it because I found it to be a particularly sad story that deserved more publicity.) It turns out she wasn’t just murdered, but brutally tortured (real torture, medieval-style), executed, and beheaded in broad daylight, right out on the street while someone stood there and recorded it with a decidedly Western camera phone. (It’s hard to find strong enough words to describe the incident when the media routinely uses strong words to describe ordinary events.) You can find links to the actual video if you care to look at it, but I personally found the descriptions plenty unsettling enough.
Anyway, I just thought I’d mention this as one more reason why I don’t feel particularly bad about those folks languishing in Gitmo. Also why it’s easy to believe that radical Islam is as much of a threat as Nazi Germany was. I’m sure there were plenty of peaceful and moderate muslims nearby in their homes, listening to the screams, but they did nothing. In fact: “She appealed to a small crowd that had gathered around her crew but nobody was willing to help her.”
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