Garbanzo Toons

Terrorists are People Too

It's been a crazy week, busy at home, busy at school; the stuff going on at school is ridiculous, but I don't want to get into that. I had to take a break from blogging for a bit. I hadn't planned on writing anything, but then I read this op-ed piece in the Detroit Free Press. Now, one of the things that bug me about a lot of people is that they take advantage of the anonymity of the Internet to say vile things about people that they would never say face to face. I try not to do that. I don't always succeed. To avoid maligning a person I've never even met, I will let him speak for himself. As he says,

Human beings possess a terrifying capacity for brutality. As an interrogator in Iraq in 2005, I was appalled as an Al Qaeda detainee told me how he had repeatedly electrocuted and beaten a man with a rubber hose until the man confessed to being an informant for the Americans.

OK, he was in Iraq on our side. That's admirable.

It is true that the Taliban and Al Qaeda are wrong. The world cannot be perfected in the name of a political ideology or Islam or any other religion. Even if it can be, I am certain that perfection will not be achieved through violence. Nonetheless, a person's involvement in an organization that practices terrorism does not put him or her beyond our comprehension. They are still people with similar wants and fears

Now here is where I have to disagree with the writer in the same strong muscular language that he uses. I don't have similar wants and needs as the Islamofascist terrorist thugs. I can live with others not belonging to the same religion as me. I'm not raising my children to murder others. They were not promised 72 virgins and young boys for slaughtering other human beings. I don't beat my wife. She is a human being, not an animal that has to walk the streets anonymously trapped in a burkha. I take responsibility for my actions. There is no "other" that I try to pin my failures on.

That's not all.

One morning, while reading the Stars and Stripes, one of the obituaries of those recently killed in Iraq caught my eye. She was Elizabeth Jacobson, a 21-year-old airman with a pretty face. She had been killed near Camp Bucca, where EFP attacks had become increasingly common.

I was furious. In retrospect, I suppose there was a bit of sexism in my response.

Well, there's some powerful feeling (softly muted in order to be politically correct) in that passage.

After reading the entire piece this morning, I wasn't sure whether to laugh or scream. So I went to work, like I do every morning. And now I'll be up past my bedtime again finishing my work, because I simply had to respond to this milquetoast . . . um, I mean . . . this writer. All I can add is Holy Joel Stein, Batman!

Labels: Detroit Free Press, Iraq, islam, Joel Stein, terrorism

posted by Harry @ 8:13 PM