The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Friday, November 19, 2004
That Marine (continued)...
The more I read about the soldier in Fallujah, the more disgusted I become in general: not with the military, but with the media's reprehensible treatment of this man, particularly when compared with their treatment of the savages we are fighting against.
In World War II our press got behind our men in uniform, and I do not believe it was just because the President then was a Democrat. Our society has degenerated to a point where the world media focuses solely on our percieved "wrongs" while simultaneously ignoring (or at best "sanitizing") some of the most sickening and heinous actions ever taken by men in the name of religion. Is it not germane to question the purpose of the relentless attack on the very men and women who make it possible for a free press to operate in the first place?
Today's Wall Street Journal had a great article entitled "Semper Fi" that really sums it all up:
Some 40 Marines have just lost their lives cleaning out one of the world's worst terror dens, in Fallujah, yet all the world wants to talk about is the NBC videotape of a Marine shooting a prostrate Iraqi inside a mosque. Have we lost all sense of moral proportion?
The al-Zarqawi TV network, also known as Al-Jazeera, has broadcast the tape to the Arab world, and U.S. media have also played it up. The point seems to be to conjure up images again of Abu Ghraib, further maligning the American purpose in Iraq. Never mind that the pictures don't come close to telling us about the context of the incident, much less what was on the mind of the soldier after days of combat.
Put yourself in that Marine's boots. He and his mates have had to endure some of the toughest infantry duty imaginable, house-to-house urban fighting against an enemy that neither wears a uniform nor obeys any normal rules of war. Here is how that enemy fights, according to an account in the Times of London:
"In the south of Fallujah yesterday, U.S. Marines found the armless, legless body of a blonde woman, her throat slashed and her entrails cut out. Benjamin Finnell, a hospital apprentice with the U.S. Navy Corps, said that she had been dead for a while, but at that location for only a day or two. The woman was wearing a blue dress; her face had been disfigured. It was unclear if the remains were the body of the Irish-born aid worker Margaret Hassan, 59, or of Teresa Borcz, 54, a Pole abducted two weeks ago. Both were married to Iraqis and held Iraqi citizenship; both were kidnapped in Baghdad last month."
When not disemboweling Iraqi women, these killers hide in mosques and hospitals, booby-trap dead bodies, and open fire as they pretend to surrender. Their snipers kill U.S. soldiers out of nowhere. According to one account, the Marine in the videotape had seen a member of his unit killed by another insurgent pretending to be dead. Who from the safety of his Manhattan sofa has standing to judge what that Marine did in that mosque?
Beyond the one incident, think of what the Marine and Army units just accomplished in Fallujah. In a single week, they killed as many as 1,200 of the enemy and captured 1,000 more. They did this despite forfeiting the element of surprise, so civilians could escape, and while taking precautions to protect Iraqis that no doubt made their own mission more difficult and hazardous. And they did all of this not for personal advantage, and certainly not to get rich, but only out of a sense of duty to their comrades, their mission and their country.
In a more grateful age, this would be hailed as one of the great battles in Marine history--with Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Hue City and the Chosin Reservoir. We'd know the names of these military units, and of many of the soldiers too. Instead, the name we know belongs to the NBC correspondent, Kevin Sites.
We suppose he was only doing his job, too. But that doesn't mean the rest of us have to indulge in the moral abdication that would equate deliberate televised beheadings of civilians with a Marine shooting a terrorist, who may or may not have been armed, amid the ferocity of battle.
Thomas Sowell also had a nice column on this topic.
While it continues to air the video of this Marine defending himself and his comrades on an hourly basis, the leftist, anti-American media in this country and elsewhere is completely burying the Marines' discovery of Jihadist slaughterhouses in the same city. Isn't it interesting that the media is so focused on one Marine's probably justifiable action, and yet collectively it completely ignores scenes that would make any civilized person sick, because to show such depravity would be to sway public opinion in a decidedly non-Jihadist fashion. How utterly tragic that the American press has sunk to such depths. One might expect this of Al Jazeera, but not of NBC...at least not until now.
In World War II our press got behind our men in uniform, and I do not believe it was just because the President then was a Democrat. Our society has degenerated to a point where the world media focuses solely on our percieved "wrongs" while simultaneously ignoring (or at best "sanitizing") some of the most sickening and heinous actions ever taken by men in the name of religion. Is it not germane to question the purpose of the relentless attack on the very men and women who make it possible for a free press to operate in the first place?
Today's Wall Street Journal had a great article entitled "Semper Fi" that really sums it all up:
Some 40 Marines have just lost their lives cleaning out one of the world's worst terror dens, in Fallujah, yet all the world wants to talk about is the NBC videotape of a Marine shooting a prostrate Iraqi inside a mosque. Have we lost all sense of moral proportion?
The al-Zarqawi TV network, also known as Al-Jazeera, has broadcast the tape to the Arab world, and U.S. media have also played it up. The point seems to be to conjure up images again of Abu Ghraib, further maligning the American purpose in Iraq. Never mind that the pictures don't come close to telling us about the context of the incident, much less what was on the mind of the soldier after days of combat.
Put yourself in that Marine's boots. He and his mates have had to endure some of the toughest infantry duty imaginable, house-to-house urban fighting against an enemy that neither wears a uniform nor obeys any normal rules of war. Here is how that enemy fights, according to an account in the Times of London:
"In the south of Fallujah yesterday, U.S. Marines found the armless, legless body of a blonde woman, her throat slashed and her entrails cut out. Benjamin Finnell, a hospital apprentice with the U.S. Navy Corps, said that she had been dead for a while, but at that location for only a day or two. The woman was wearing a blue dress; her face had been disfigured. It was unclear if the remains were the body of the Irish-born aid worker Margaret Hassan, 59, or of Teresa Borcz, 54, a Pole abducted two weeks ago. Both were married to Iraqis and held Iraqi citizenship; both were kidnapped in Baghdad last month."
When not disemboweling Iraqi women, these killers hide in mosques and hospitals, booby-trap dead bodies, and open fire as they pretend to surrender. Their snipers kill U.S. soldiers out of nowhere. According to one account, the Marine in the videotape had seen a member of his unit killed by another insurgent pretending to be dead. Who from the safety of his Manhattan sofa has standing to judge what that Marine did in that mosque?
Beyond the one incident, think of what the Marine and Army units just accomplished in Fallujah. In a single week, they killed as many as 1,200 of the enemy and captured 1,000 more. They did this despite forfeiting the element of surprise, so civilians could escape, and while taking precautions to protect Iraqis that no doubt made their own mission more difficult and hazardous. And they did all of this not for personal advantage, and certainly not to get rich, but only out of a sense of duty to their comrades, their mission and their country.
In a more grateful age, this would be hailed as one of the great battles in Marine history--with Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Hue City and the Chosin Reservoir. We'd know the names of these military units, and of many of the soldiers too. Instead, the name we know belongs to the NBC correspondent, Kevin Sites.
We suppose he was only doing his job, too. But that doesn't mean the rest of us have to indulge in the moral abdication that would equate deliberate televised beheadings of civilians with a Marine shooting a terrorist, who may or may not have been armed, amid the ferocity of battle.
Thomas Sowell also had a nice column on this topic.
While it continues to air the video of this Marine defending himself and his comrades on an hourly basis, the leftist, anti-American media in this country and elsewhere is completely burying the Marines' discovery of Jihadist slaughterhouses in the same city. Isn't it interesting that the media is so focused on one Marine's probably justifiable action, and yet collectively it completely ignores scenes that would make any civilized person sick, because to show such depravity would be to sway public opinion in a decidedly non-Jihadist fashion. How utterly tragic that the American press has sunk to such depths. One might expect this of Al Jazeera, but not of NBC...at least not until now.
