Spengler brings up the question:
..In countries where torture is habitual, unexceptionable and embedded in everyday life, it is foolish to imagine that our armed forces might conduct successful operations without employing torture as a matter of normal practice. That is why we cannot hope to intervene in civil societies in the Middle East. On April 4, the London Times published a video of Taliban soldiers publicly torturing a teenaged girl in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, reportedly for the crime of stepping out of her house unaccompanied. It is hideous; men hold the girl down while one beats her with a leather strap. The girl screams in pain. Around her a large circle of men watch…
…This observation came in Pipes’ recent commentary on a remarkable report of the torture of a businessman by a prince of the United Arab Emirates over a commercial dispute. Videotapes of Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan torturing a grain dealer over a $5,000 delivery were aired April 22 on ABC News.
The Sheikh begins by stuffing sand down the man’s mouth, as the police officers restrain the victim. Then he fires bullets from an automatic rifle around him as the man howls incomprehensibly. At another point on the tape, the Sheikh can be seen telling the cameraman to come closer. “Get closer. Get closer. Get closer. Let his suffering show,” the Sheikh says.
Over the course of the tape, Sheikh Issa acts in an increasingly sadistic manner. He uses an electric cattle prod against the man’s testicles and inserts it in his anus. At another point, as the man wails in pain, the Sheikh pours lighter fluid on the man’s testicles and sets them aflame. Then the tape shows the Sheikh sorting through some wooden planks. “I remember there was one that had a nail in it,” he says on the tape. The Sheikh then pulls down the pants of the victim and repeatedly strikes him with board and its protruding nail.
Sometimes ignorance and prejudice reinforce a hostile view of peoples or countries. In the case of the Middle East, the vast majority of Americans have no clue as to the degree of ambient cruelty. Leave aside that between 50% (lowest estimate) and 90% (highest estimate) of Egyptian girls are subjected to genital mutilation, the horror of everyday life in what President Obama calls “the Muslim world” is more than the American mind can absorb.
Which regimes in the Western world have been most notorious for a high level of ambient cruelty? Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Castro’s Cuba, etc. What do these regimes have in common? All of them completely suppressed freedom. The only way Sheikh Issa can get away with his monstrosity is because he figures no one would ever find out – at least, no one who can possibly over throw him will find out, because he won’t allow anyone to freely inquire into his doings. So it was with Hitler, Stalin and Castro – these men behaved in the most beastly manner possible towards their fellow human beings, but it didn’t matter because there was no one within their nations who could expose it to the general public and thus provoke a reaction against the barbarism.
Moslems, being people, are no different from any other people, on the whole. Certainly, due to their religious background they have some different view points from us, but the fundamentals of humanity are the same everywhere…Fallen Man is capable of horrific acts of evil, but the nature of evil deeds makes all but the most depraved unwilling to do them before the general public. The reason Issa – or Hitler, Stalin or Castro – can do the horrible deeds is because their societies are unfree, and thus there is no one to call them to account. Thus it goes throughout Moslem-majority areas of the world…outside of Iraq and Afghanistan (and, as yet, very imperfectly, even there), there is no place a Moslem can live in surrounded by Moslems where there is the freedom to criticize the government. And so the government’s are able to act in an unjust manner, and this tends to mean that the most ruthless tend to run the show.
Obama is, indeed, far too starry eyed about Islam – and most Americans also don’t have a full appreciation of the sort of people who run the Moslem nations. But we cannot and must not seal ourselves off from Islam – we must engage, by war and diplomacy, in order to press Islam into becoming free. Once the Moslem people are free, they will take care of their own savages, just as we take care of ours.
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