The Voice Of One Crying Out In Suburbia

Another editorial on Abu Ghraib, this one by the ever sturdy and even tempered Charles Krauthammer. Three main points I came away with...

1) The war on terror is more than an isolated struggle. All of the various struggles all tie togther, and in large part the struggle against terrorism, and by proxy against Islam, is also in large part about sex roles. Gender is one of the precious differences God created in mankind, and whether it be the subjugation of women in Islam or the objectification of women in our hyper sexualized society, gender roles are all too often a target of the Enemy.

2) As pointed out by others, the prison scandal sends a clear picture to the Islamic world that all the hateful rhetoric spewed by imams about the West is true. They will never hear about the severe punishment in store for those who perpetrated these crimes (and they are crimes and beneath the dignity of the American fighting man, let's not sugar coat it). All they saw are western women abusing muslim men in a sexaul and dominating fashion, and nothing can inflame them like that.

3) Had these been muslim men abusing Americans, there would have been nary a peep from the arab press. Despite that, we hold ourselves to a higher standard, as befits a free society. As Krauthammer wrote:

>>>"The American offenders should surely be judged by our standards, not by others'. By our standards, these were egregious violations of human rights and human dignity. They must be punished seriously. They do not, however, reflect the ethos of the American military, which has performed with remarkable grace and courage in Iraq, or of American society. <<<

Indeed. America is the greatest society on earth, the pinnacle of western civilization which is the pinnacle of the world's civilizations. Poitically incorrect though it may be to say, it is true. I have yet to hear an argument that taken as a whole any other society has the same freedoms and standard of living we enjoy. That is in large part what makes the muslim world hate us and makes them willing to kill themselves in order to inflict harm upon us.