Sympathy for the terrorist?
I don’t know about you, but when I read this piece in the Times Online about Imad Mughniyeh’s (their spelling) assassination, I couldn’t help but feel it had just a smidgen of sympathy in it.
Sympathy, that is, for the terrorist, not for his victims.
Granted, it’s subtle. But I think it’s present. Not to mention the fact that the headline (“Israel kills terror chief with headrest bomb”) presents an unequivocal conclusion—that the death was the work of Israel’s Mossad—and then offers little evidence or source material for its assertion except to say that it is “an inevitable assumption,” and that Israelis were happy to see him go as well as having reasons for wanting to off him. Note also this slyly-worded mention of Israeli intelligence:
According to Israeli intelligence sources, someone had replaced the headrest of the driver’s seat with another containing a small high-explosive charge. Israel welcomed his death but the prime minister’s office denied responsibility. Hezbollah accused the “Zionist Israelis” of killing its “brother commander”…
So “someone” placed explosives in the headrest, according to Israeli intelligence. And Hezbollah thinks that “someone” is the Israelis. What a surprise.
It’s certainly an excellent possibility that this was the work of the Mossad; I’m not denying that. But as I pointed out here, there’s no dearth of suspects and no lack of enemies for the death of this particular terrorist.
The Times Online shows no similar eagerness to make unequivocal accusations about Mughniyeh himself. It manages to use about 1,400 words to describe him and his death while often seeming to give him at least a tiny benefit of the doubt about his terrorist activities.
How is this done? Look at the language [emphasis mine]:
….the Americans and Israelis who blamed him for plane hijackings and other bloody attacks which killed hundreds of their citizens…
It goes on with careful statements such as “Western terrorism experts say” and “another notorious act attributed to him” and ends with ye olde cycle-of-violence explanation.
And then there’s this:
Mughniyeh’s mother, Um Imad, sat amid a sea of black chadors, a lonely, sombre figure as mourners held their hero’s picture aloft.
“If only I had more boys to carry on in his footsteps,” she sighed, confessing that she did not have any pictures of him, even from his childhood, as he had taken them away. He was the third of her sons to die in a car bombing.
No similar scenes of grief and bereavement are mentioned for Muchniyeh’s innocent victims or their families, who remain nameless and undescribed. And the deaths of Mughniyeh’s brothers are slipped in almost as though they had met their demises in car accidents. Later on, their deaths are mentioned again in a cryptic manner, without any details of what these people might have been doing to cause them to meet this particular fate; it’s almost as though they might have just been unfortunate passers-by:
Mughniyeh lost two brothers, Jihad and Fuad, in car bomb explosions in Beirut.
If you’re curious to know more about Imad and his brothers, you might want to take a look at this more complete report, offering more of the history of the aptly named Jihad (mom must have been prescient) and Fuad, who were among the founders of Hezbollah in Lebanon in the 80s.
Imad Mughniyeh is alleged to have been personally responsible for torturing kidnapped US Ambassador William Buckley and hijacked Navy Diver Robert Stethem before killing them. But you don’t read about that in the Times, either.
But somehow the article manages to end not only with suggestions that Hezbollah violence is a response to events such as the assassination of Mughniyeh rather than a cause of them, but a list of six Israeli assassinations of similar “militants” since the most recent head of the Mossad was inaugurated in 2002.
“Militants.” Of course.
[ADDENDUM: More on the deaths of Jihad and Fuad. Seems they met with “work accidents.”
And the same linked PJ article contains a single-sentence description of Imad Mughniyeh’s life, his death, and its significance that’s better than the entire Times Online article could muster:
In short order the man in charge of Hezbollah’s special operations for nearly three decades ”” a man wanted in 42 countries; a killer of hundreds of Americans, including Marines, CIA folks, and diplomats; a man whose reach wrecked a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires as well as an American oil workers’ housing complex in Saudi Arabia; a multinational terrorist born in Lebanon, who resides in Tehran and travels under deepest Syrian cover ”” was blown away as he stepped out of an intelligence meeting in a plush Damascus residential neighborhood of his mentor state. And no one left a note.]
I’ve read where the Israelis have denied responsibility, with western reporting hinting that it must’ve been them anyway because an unidentified high ranking Israeli military official has said that he is well aware that Hezbollah would likely wish to retaliate for the assassination. As if merely acknowledging this truth is tantamount to a confession.
Actually, Im really hoping we did it. It would be comforting for me to know that this country possess the moxie to do what’s necessary, anywhere, anytime.
Liberal sympathy for Muslim terrorists goes without saying. It’s at the point that I don’t like to be around liberals any more.
Violence itself is the problem. If only some reasonable person – maybe Barack Obama or Dennis Kucinich – could have spoken face to face with Mughniyeh…
gcotharn: I love it.
The late Mr. Mughniyeh hated Israel, hated America, hated Christianity, hated Western Civilization, and committed brutal acts of violence against them all. What’s not for a modern liberal to like? He’s like Ward Churchill, only instead of being a pasty-assed poseur, he’s a real Dangerous Brown Person.
Expect to see his mug(h) on t-shirts and flag posters at Obama campaign offices any day now.
Someone else will simply take Mughniyeh’s place, there is no hope until the retaliations are broadened to include entire groups of Islamist supporters, and the populations which promote and protect them. Their strategy in Sderot, for example, and generally, is to squeeze; denying relaxed living space; wearing down the “stubborn” dhimmi is effective for them or they wouldn’t do it. The only alternative left is to squeeze back, effectively push the living space back in Gaza until it is 2 miles from Sderot, instead of less than one. The politicians from Bush and Rice to all the dimocrats need to have their noses rubbed in the reality that they are all engaged in a self destructive game of pretend with virtually the entire islamist presence in the mideast, including and starting with Abbas….. negotiation, from the North Koreans to the Pali’s, is a fools game, and we are the fools…. There can never, will never be peace with those people, there can only be a relentlessly enforced police environment which provides a begrudged non-violent coexistance. Like I told a smart-ass I work with, after they’re done with me they’re coming after you….
Muslims Against Sharia congratulate the organization responsible for elimination of terrorist Imad Mugniyeh on a job well done!
http://muslimsagainstsharia.blogspot.com/2008/02/targeted-killing-of-imad-mugniyeh.html
perfected dem, it does seem like there are always others to take the place of whoever we remove. However, we can likely assume that the replacements are in general less competent than the originals, and have fewer networked connections.
But even if they were just as good, removing leaders is like removing the top plate in the old cafeteria spring-loaded stack. It looks like you are making no progress, and then suddenly you see the stack is almost done.
If the NYT loves terrorists and hates America, why do you keep reading it? Just let the free market work its magic!
another take: this is not the NY Times. The Times Online is a British publication.
I don’t actually subscribe to any of these periodicals, by the way. But I find it extremely edifying to see what those on the left, the right, and in the middle say about the events of our time.
Muslims Against Sharia Says: ….
Best of luck to you, you are a little slice of hope; your participation is profound, greatly appreciated and respected here…..
We should put GPS activated bombs in every car headrest shipped to the middle east. And a handkerchief that says BANG that comes out of the rearview mirror.
another take: this is not the NY Times. The Times Online is a British publication.
My mistake!
Realy dangerous terrorists – organizers and masterminds of spectacular acts of mass murder – are rare commodity, most of jihadists are trully dumb, and this makes targeted assasinations viable strategy. Even more important is that necessity to hide makes their contacts very limited and drastically hinders efficiency of terrorists networks. It also makes replacement much more problematic because of additional risk of infiltration by agents of counter-terror organizations.
Russia has a rich history of counter-terrorist operations since second half of 19 century. In some periods there were more than 200 000 of terrorist acts a year, but creation of dedicated police force (Okhranka) using lots of agents-provocateurs decimated these networks and eventually wiped them out. It took only one decade.
Although I wish the Israelis could take credit for this assassination, I don’t believe they had any part in it.
If you look back at the highly sensitive Syrian Air Strike in September 2007, the Israeli government neither accepted responsibility nor denied it. Put basically, they said absolutely nothing.
I think that if Israel had any part in this assassination, the Israeli response would have been the same, to say absolutely nothing. The fact that the Israeli government denied responsibility to me is a signal that they really did not have anything to do with it.
Lets face it, they knew that regardless of what is proven, Israel will be blamed. If it was an accident, and the guy detonated himself, it was still Israel’s fault.
A muslim against sharia is like a christian who was never baptized.
Sergey, good point. I’d thought about that too, how the late 19th century (not just in Russia) coped with anarchists and eventually supressed them. The question is which of their tactics can we adopt while not doing undue harm to civil liberties.
Here’s a question I’ve asked before without receiving an answer. Maybe the question is naive and stupid, but here goes:
We always see photos and videos of Hezbollah and other terrorist (or militant or charitable) organizations holding demonstrations, parades, training sessions, etc., apparently attended by hundreds or thousands of supporters. Many of these get-togethers feature guys in masks carrying assault rifles and rocket launchers – sometimes discharging same.
Question: Wouldn’t it be more efficient to drop some napalm on them when they’re all in a bunch like that? I mean, as opposed to running lengthy, delicate secret ops to take out individual members using clever devices like exploding head rests.
If Hitler had try to hold a second Nurnberg rally in 1944, seems like a certain amount of bombing and strafing would have ensued. So why do we let terrorists have parades and rallies without doing something about it?
For Liberals it is always “Hug A Terrorist , A Tree , An Inmate , and a Serial Killer , month.
American Infidel
Michael Canzano
Bugs:
Re strafing and/or napalming Hezbollah demonstrations — not a bad idea, really. I read a possibly apocryphal account that the US Army in Iraq was doing something along those lines: stationing snipers to cover vehicles wrecked by IED blasts. Any “militants” who wanted to climb on top of the wreck to wave an AK-47 for the cameras got a long-distance call from Uncle Sam in .50 caliber. Or so the story went.
Trimegistus,
Actually, U.S. on the ground personel, on their own initiative, sometimes faked IED blast sites as an attractor of undesirables. This was offensive action they could take which conformed with their rules of engagement.
This also, and possibly in line with Sergey’s Russia example, seems to me the path to defeating terror groups:
Open your own faux terror groups. Do it everywhere.
The odds of accidentally joining a faux terror group should be larger than the odds of finding your way to an actual terror group.
The faux terror groups could even outbid the actual terror groups in providing services to local poplulations. This would discredit actual terror groups, plus strain the resources of actual terror groups. The economic strain would be the equivelent of Reagan’s Cold War strategy of forcing the USSR into a large arms build-up.
Sounds like your proposing the Wal-Mart of terrorist organizations. You could also spot the jihadis who didn’t join – they’d be the ones whining about “big box” terror groups running local cells out of business, not providing survivor benefits for martyrs’ families, etc.
lol. yes! I’m proposing more like the Starbucks of terrorist organizations: a faux terror-joining opportunity on every corner. How can an authentic terrorist tell the real terror orgs from the fake terror orgs?
If the NYT loves terrorists and hates America, why do you keep reading it? Just let the free market work its magic!
And indeed the free market IS working its magic, as the Old Gray Lady’s falling readership and stock prices attest. They’ve even been frightened enough to hire Bill Kristol in order to give the appearance of balance.
But as just one out of nine op-ed writers we KNOW he’s just a figurehead, don’t we? The rest of the Op-ed staff, from Dowd to Rich, is mainly left-wing. We can only hope that there is continued failure of readership and stock prices for this traitorous rag.
“We can only hope that there is continued failure of readership and stock prices for this traitorous rag.”
grackle
The more the numbers fall, the more it makes the NYT right, and the greater its embattled victim status becomes, don’t-cha-know. Anyway, it’s always got the Endangerd Species Act to fall back on, so, why should a Prog Bro worry?
Things are getting much worse before they’re getting better; the mainstream haven’t really been hurt enough yet to make them angry enough to fight back; the troops are tired; Obama is riding the American intellectual malaise like a magic carpet to become POTUS. The only silver cloud is that the Clintons arrogant balloon is being popped; but the longer term tragedy that is about to unfold with the manchurian candidate, like his mentor Jimmy Cracker, will finally bring mature realism and resolve to the honest American center…..
As far I know, Israel mustered the best in history anti-terrorist special services acting both domestically and abroad (Shin-Beth and Mossad), and nobody in Israel feels that they somehow infringe on their liberties. Even Israeli leftists, having much in common with American ones, do not indulge in paranoid fears about these organizations, in contrast to their American conterparts.
May be, poor reputation of FBI and CIA and leftist paranoia about Patriot Act and wiretapping are simply products of Hollywood propaganda habitually portraying them in the worst possible light, like in Syriana and in scores of political trillers. Such fears has little if any foundation in reality.
Chesterton wrote an extravaganza novel about Russian anarchists and British cops fighting them: The Man Who Was Thursday. The team of anarchists turned out to consist of agents-provocateurs, and their ring-leader was the chief cop. This was written after a huge scandal emerged about Asef, leader of Russian terrorist group, who was a double agent with ties to Russian secret political police.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevno_Azef
If you were to go after assemblies of terrorists, you wouldn’t use napalm. You’d use cluster bombs or HE fused for an airburst.
Of course, where there are mobs involved, there are usually “children” involved, often being indoctrinated. I’d put the moral blame on the parents, but the press wouldn’t like that. Well, actually they would. They’d eat it up.
I still like the idea. When the press ran photos of mobs cheering and shooting guns in the air after the WTC was hit, I fantasized about a few hand grenades tossed into those mobs, to bring home to those people the horror of what they were cheering. Diagnose me if you like, Neo, but the combination of the irresponsible use of automatic weapons and the desire to cause harm to people who would almost certainly help them if the circumstance arose said to me “Evil! Enemy!” and if the evil is in the culture rather than the individual, it needs to be answered nevertheless.
Sergey: I just finished reading The Man Who Was Thursday. What a strange book! And it seems like most of the characters are still chasing each other around the world today – both politically and religiously.
I wasn’t aware of the link with Asef. Thanks for the info.
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