The Cruelty of Cowards

[Tigermike 3,053]

The Cruelty of Cowards

Cowardice is the mother of cruelty.

-- Montaigne

"The beheadings are still happening, but we have an order not to broadcast them. Everything is videotaped but we can't broadcast them. We do seek to capture and imprison American soldiers, but you have to understand that it is very difficult to do so because they patrol in groups, at least 15 soldiers at a time. We hope and pray to capture them."

-- Al-Qaida fighter Abu Adam al-Maqdisi, interviewed on a radical Islamic website, April 27, 2007.

Even as we pray for those three missing American soldiers we are prepared for the worst.

They are not prisoners of war; that is, their capture was not a happenstance of battle.

They were the very object of the action that left their comrades dead and burned near Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad.

They were kidnapped, sought out as Americans for the purpose of embarrassment, humiliation, torture, and finally death and mutilation as a horrific lesson to the "Crusaders" and to the world.

Think about it. If three Islamic fighters had been captured by the Americans, would there be any apprehension about their fate? Of course not. Despite all the fervid Abu Ghraib and Gitmo propagandizing of assorted leftists, pseudo-peaceniks and Democrat apologists, the general presumption is they would be treated decently.

But as soon as the news of the disappearance of these three American soldiers was released, the presumption was for the worst. For in the twisted world of Al-Qaida and its spawn of Islamofascists cruelty is first and second nature.

And there is no cruelty quite like the cruelty of cowards. Because, in the end, cruelty is their only weapon. The cruelty that leaves bodies in the smoking ruins of buildings. The cruelty that beheads. The cruelty that slaughters innocents in the marketplace. The cruelty born of a cowardice that camouflages itself in the ignorant "bravery" of suicide bombers.

This hate-fueled cruelty feeds on itself, grows and intimidates by its certainty. Where are the imams who will speak against it? Where are voices for Allah the "merciful" as these soldiers' lives hang in the balance? If they are not secretly sympathetic to it then they are shut up, intimidated, muzzled by the certainty of a hateful cruelty; a revenging cruelty that seeks out all who would oppose or protest it.

There is nothing else certain in the world of Al-Qaida and radical Islam but this great cruelty. It is not merely a capacity for cruelty; it is intrinsic, organic cruelty. All of Islamofascism's small cruelties - its denials of freedom and free thought, its humiliating impositions against the very half of the human race that gives its minions life - are given peculiar force because of the certainty, the dependability, the inevitability of its great cruelty.

The Palestinian Al-Qaida fighter quoted at the beginning of this piece boasted in the same April 27th interview that "the jihad that began in Muslim Afghanistan and then spread to Iraq shall not stop there and will not be limited by any border."

And as we have said before, no matter how Islamic apologists parse it and high-minded scholars and imams turn words on their heads to explain it, "jihad" always seems to end up writ in bloody revenge, murder and histrionic cruelty.

We are in a war against this cruelty. It is a war some think can be "ended." But it is a war, I think, that must be won or lost. And the consequences of losing are dire for mankind.

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=051707C