Adam's Apple
Senior Member
- Apr 25, 2004
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Whether one intends to or not.
Chestlessness
By David Warren, Ottawa Citizen
August 30, 2006
The case of the two Fox News journalists, held hostage in Gaza, is worth dwelling upon. They were released after their captors had made tapes of them dressed as Arabs and announcing they had changed their names and converted to Islam.
Why did Fatah bother to make the video? Didnt they realize conversion under duress means nothing? That no one, East or West, would take it at face value?
They didnt make it for face value. They made it to show the whole Muslim world, via satellite television, what wimps these Westerners are. That theyll do anything at all to save their lives, that they dont think twice about it. That is the substance of most Islamo-fascist propaganda: that the West consists of straw men, of men without chests, of men easily pushed over.
These two journalists were captured and held under nasty conditions by a branch of Fatah: the Palestinian party associated not with the radical Hamas, but with the supposedly moderate party of Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian National Authority. They were for use as chips in prisoner exchanges. They could be sold, or exchanged for other prisoners.
President Abbas could have had them sprung at a word, but did not do so at first, for he had nothing to lose by playing with the crisis. At no point, for instance, was he told he could either release the prisoners, or have his compound at Ramallah levelled. We dont overreact in the West, the way we used to do -- we dont like to put out little fires, we prefer to wait until they are big ones. And we prefer blaming ourselves to blaming the enemy, when the enemy lights the fire. We assume they only do it because we must have done something to annoy them.
Jean-François Revel: Democratic civilization is the first in history to blame itself because another power is trying to destroy it.
At the time Revel said this, the enemy power was Soviet Communism. The intellectuals, the smart journalists, the fashionable academics, the smug urbane of all descriptions, were hardly pro-Communist. They were more ironical than that, they were anti-anti-Communist. Today they are anti-anti-Islamo-fascist.
I created a scene with a column, many years ago, when I wrote about the young men in the corridors of the University of Montreal, who stood by and watched while Gamil Garbi (alias Marc Lépine) shot fourteen women to death. To a man (if you could call them men), they explained afterwards, We couldnt do anything, he had a gun. As I pointed out at the time, we have bred young men who will stand by and watch a psychopath shoot defenceless women, so long as he assures them he will not shoot them. And we have bred the young women these young men deserve.
Men without chests, men without character, men who dont think twice.
http://www.davidwarrenonline.com
Chestlessness
By David Warren, Ottawa Citizen
August 30, 2006
The case of the two Fox News journalists, held hostage in Gaza, is worth dwelling upon. They were released after their captors had made tapes of them dressed as Arabs and announcing they had changed their names and converted to Islam.
Why did Fatah bother to make the video? Didnt they realize conversion under duress means nothing? That no one, East or West, would take it at face value?
They didnt make it for face value. They made it to show the whole Muslim world, via satellite television, what wimps these Westerners are. That theyll do anything at all to save their lives, that they dont think twice about it. That is the substance of most Islamo-fascist propaganda: that the West consists of straw men, of men without chests, of men easily pushed over.
These two journalists were captured and held under nasty conditions by a branch of Fatah: the Palestinian party associated not with the radical Hamas, but with the supposedly moderate party of Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian National Authority. They were for use as chips in prisoner exchanges. They could be sold, or exchanged for other prisoners.
President Abbas could have had them sprung at a word, but did not do so at first, for he had nothing to lose by playing with the crisis. At no point, for instance, was he told he could either release the prisoners, or have his compound at Ramallah levelled. We dont overreact in the West, the way we used to do -- we dont like to put out little fires, we prefer to wait until they are big ones. And we prefer blaming ourselves to blaming the enemy, when the enemy lights the fire. We assume they only do it because we must have done something to annoy them.
Jean-François Revel: Democratic civilization is the first in history to blame itself because another power is trying to destroy it.
At the time Revel said this, the enemy power was Soviet Communism. The intellectuals, the smart journalists, the fashionable academics, the smug urbane of all descriptions, were hardly pro-Communist. They were more ironical than that, they were anti-anti-Communist. Today they are anti-anti-Islamo-fascist.
I created a scene with a column, many years ago, when I wrote about the young men in the corridors of the University of Montreal, who stood by and watched while Gamil Garbi (alias Marc Lépine) shot fourteen women to death. To a man (if you could call them men), they explained afterwards, We couldnt do anything, he had a gun. As I pointed out at the time, we have bred young men who will stand by and watch a psychopath shoot defenceless women, so long as he assures them he will not shoot them. And we have bred the young women these young men deserve.
Men without chests, men without character, men who dont think twice.
http://www.davidwarrenonline.com
