Below is a horrid, graphic description of the murder of an Iraqi journalist named Atwar Bahjat, which I am reposting from this Mudville Gazette entry because I believe the American public has a duty to understand what they are facing from Muslim fundmentalists, in Iraq and wherever else these disgusting roaches breed or are allowed to scurry about.
Two men drove up in a pick-up truck, asking for her. She appealed to a small crowd that had gathered around her crew but nobody was willing to help her. It was reported at the time that she had been shot dead with her cameraman and sound man.
We now know that it was not that swift for Bahjat. First she was stripped to the waist, a humiliation for any woman but particularly so for a pious Muslim who concealed her hair, arms and legs from men other than her father and brother.
Then her arms were bound behind her back. A golden locket in the shape of Iraq that became her glittering trademark in front of the television cameras must have been removed at some point — it is nowhere to be seen in the grainy film, which was made by someone who pointed a mobile phone at her as she lay on a patch of earth in mortal terror.
By the time filming begins, the condemned woman has been blindfolded with a white bandage.
It is stained with blood that trickles from a wound on the left side of her head. She is moaning, although whether from the pain of what has already been done to her or from the fear of what is about to be inflicted is unclear.
Just as Bahjat bore witness to countless atrocities that she covered for her television station, Al-Arabiya, during Iraq’s descent into sectarian conflict, so the recording of her execution embodies the depths of the country’s depravity after three years of war.
A large man dressed in military fatigues, boots and cap approaches from behind and covers her mouth with his left hand. In his right hand, he clutches a large knife with a black handle and an 8in blade. He proceeds to cut her throat from the middle, slicing from side to side.
Her cries — “Ah, ah, ah†— can be heard above the “Allahu akbar†(God is greatest) intoned by the holder of the mobile phone.
Even then, there is no quick release for Bahjat. Her executioner suddenly stands up, his job only half done. A second man in a dark T-shirt and camouflage trousers places his right khaki boot on her abdomen and pushes down hard eight times, forcing a rush of blood from her wounds as she moves her head from right to left.
Only now does the executioner return to finish the task. He hacks off her head and drops it to the ground, then picks it up again and perches it on her bare chest so that it faces the film-maker in a grotesque parody of one of her pieces to camera.
The voice of one of the Arab world’s most highly regarded and outspoken journalists has been silenced. She was 30.
Now, once you’ve recovered from the horror that you, as a decent human being should feel at the thought of a woman having a power drill applied to various parts of her body, then being stripped and having her throat slit while the cretinous thugs responsible mutter about God’s greatness, there are several factors that I would like you, my reader, to keep in mind as you think about Iraq.
The first is that Iraq under Saddam was populated by the same thugs that perpetrated acts like the one you just read about. Iraq before Saddam was populated by the same thugs. Iraq after Saddam is still populated by the same thugs. Under Saddam, you didn’t bother to think about the people being raped and fed into plastic shredders because there was no free press here. If the monsters have their way, Iraq will revert once again to a nice black hole you don’t have to think about.
The second thing I’d like you to think about is the undeniable fact that technology is advancing exponentially and that is shrinking the world. If you are one of those who believe we can ignore other parts of the globe and not be affected by what is happening in them, you’re a short-sighted fool and represent a danger to the rest of us.
Finally, I’d like you to imagine what your life would be like if your daughter was treated similarly to Atwar Bahjat. What if your child was snatched off the streets, tortured with drills to the arms, legs, stomach and eyeball and then murdered by throat slitting while evil men recorded the event to instill fear in and silence others. Would you be silent?
This century will be defined by clashes between those who embrace change and those who fear it. Good and evil do exist and they come in many different guises, not all of which are obvious. It seems clear to me that the single biggest threat to human advancement in this hide inside a religion called Islam and wage evil in the name of Allah.
Human history has been tumultuous and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. I hope that most of us can live out our lives without the fear that we will have our cognitive organ hacked off with a rusty knife. I hope that the majority of those of you who read this blog entry will not be crushed inside a building or blown up on your way to work or snatched in the middle of the night only to be found shot in the head in a garbage dump a few days later.
What is happening here in Iraq now on a day to day basis will be a factor in determining your statisical chances of experiencing terrrorism first hand during your lifetime. Atwar Bahjat died horribly because she told the story of Iraq. Were you listening? Maybe you should start.
The above mentioned video is a hoax. It is a hoax only in the sense that Atwar Bahjat wasn’t the person being beheaded in the video. She was still murdered, but perhaps not during a videotaped beheading, so that’s all good *insert sarcasm here*. Instead, the person in the video was a truck driver who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and got horribly murdered because he did something that “offended” Muslims fanatics. The general gist of my entry doesn’t change one whit. Islamists still represent a real and horrible threat to my way of life and yours in the coming century, which I believe will be the century of Islamic fanaticism. We shall all see, except for those of us who lose our heads.