By Selwyn Duke
One pearl of wisdom my parents imparted to me during the years that I was equal parts Dennis the Menace and budding literatus extraordinaire was that you shouldn’t wash your dirty laundry in public. This advice from my youth percolated into my consciousness as I pondered the handling of the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. For the good of our country, the war against Islamic extremists, our soldiers in the field and, quite frankly, the world at large, this matter should have been handled off the radar screen – with the utmost discretion. Make no mistake about it, the rule of law could have been applied and the transgressors punished proportionately without all the self-flagellation and the frustration of what is western civilization’s modern-day crusade against those who would convert by the sword or put us to the sword.
But loose lips sink ships, and as we are all painfully aware the handling of this issue has been anything but discreet. During the last few weeks we have been subjected to an endless barrage of stories and pictures about Abu Ghraib. So disproportionate is the coverage and so gratuitous is the criticism that you might think it’s generated by the virulently anti-American arab media outlet Al-Jazeira. Of course, though, that’s not the case – Al-Jazeira doesn’t need to penetrate the American market. Why, its bidding is done with great aplomb by Al-ABC, Al-NBC, Al-CBS, Al-CNN, Ted Al-Kennedy and, lest we forget the most odious Al of all, Al-Franken.
But before I finish taking the Amerikan media and its political acolytes to task, I want to make a few comments about the abuse itself. First of all, I’ll preface my analysis by saying that I do not believe that sexual humiliation and degradation should be used as a means of extracting information. And even more significantly, those who administer punishment or apply pressure should not take perverted joy in the task. That is sick.
Having said that, I don’t find it at all surprising that most of the abuse that has come to light DID involve sexual humiliation and degradation. I say this because [and I am not the only pundit who has had this insight] I think it highly probable that most of the young soldiers in question didn’t really think that what they were visiting upon their prisoners was any big deal. Think about it: the average age of military personnel is nineteen, and for sure those who were on the ground delivering the abuse were young people. And these young people were raised in a highly sexualized culture in post-sexual revolution America. Now, if you were weaned on MTV and Loveline, received constant messages that sex is a game, homosexuality a legitimate lifestyle and that what used to be called behaving like a slut is not degrading but the fruits of liberation, how likely would you be to recognize the gravity of the incidents at Abu Ghraib? Heck, there are some people – and I suspect you can find an inordinate number of them in the media – to whom that kind of behavior is recreation. Just think about the picture of the soldierette holding the arab man on a leash and think bondage, dominatrixes and rubber suits.
Now, don’t think that my somewhat dismissive tone means that I take such behavior lightly. No, in fact, no one decries our inexorable movement toward paganesque sexual mores more than this writer. What I won’t take seriously, though, is the idea that the media have all of a sudden experienced some kind of sexual propriety-inducing conversion and are now viscerally offended by licentious displays. Listen, many of these hypocrites have been the authors of the very American promiscuity and decadence that have prompted the Muslim world to dub us the Great Satan. These are the pseudo-intellectual lunkheads who advocate homosexual unions, condoms in schools, sexual experimentation, fornication, the acceptance of drag queens as schoolteachers and the ever widening of the boundaries that govern sexuality. So, no, I don’t take such perversion lightly. I just care a lot more about the fact that young Americans are engaging in such behavior than the fact that some suspected terrorists were forced to do so. I also think there’s something wrong with people who label it perversion when that tactic helps them hammer political opponents, but advocate non-judgementalism and label it an alternative lifestyle when trying to market it to the next generation.
Then there were the media propagandists who characterized the activity at Abu Ghraib as “torture.” What occurred was abuse and maltreatment for sure, but torture? Please. Torture is when you pull out someone’s fingernails, put him on a rack, give him an acid bath [like Saddam Hussein did], put “the pear” in his mouth [no, it ain’t a fruit], or administer electric shock. Torture is, well, what is used routinely in many arab countries; it’s what Saddam Hussein turned into sport. But you won’t see too much media focus on that; it’s . . . uh . . . too graphic for us – like the Nick Berg beheading. Of course, their relative silence about these true atrocities could also have something to do with the fact that they haven’t yet found a way to absolve the Muslim torturers of responsibility and lay the blame at the feet of George Bush, right-wing radio talk show hosts, the Vatican and Jerry Falwell.
But something else occurs to me about our over-reaction to the Iraqi prison images. Yes, there’s the media hype. But this is also the nation of self-esteem programs in schools and television for prison inmates. It’s the land where psychologists have convinced us that punishment is a dirty word and that nary a harsh word of reproach should be uttered to an ill-behaved brat lest you damage his inflated ego. In a word, we’ve become “soft.” It’s not surprising, then, that many of us would mistake mere maltreatment for Gestapo-like torments. After all, this is an age in which many mothers run around saying to their children “You’re gonna get a time-out!” as if it’s a serious consequence. Who knows? Perhaps in a year those suspected terrorists will have TV, computers, weight rooms, and will be able to file lawsuits against the government from the poky.
Perhaps that last line drew a chuckle, but in point of fact there’s nothing amusing about the media’s incessant propagandizing. What they are guilty of is nothing less – not in law but in spirit – than treason. By focusing to such an inordinate degree on relatively minor American transgressions while virtually ignoring the truly heinous acts of our enemies, they have become our enemies. Just contrast the coverage of Abu Ghraib with that of the Nick Berg or Daniel Pearl beheading, or of the murder and burning of the four American contractors in Fallujah. More shameful and ridiculous still, is how it even greatly overshadows the reporting on the multitude of atrocities Saddam Hussein visited upon his people. His brutality was the stuff of horror movies, and you could fill a nightly news broadcast with blood-curdling stories about his wickedness for a year and not want for material. For he was a man who routinely treated people as play-things, in much the way a cat would a mouse. Truth be known, if Abu Ghraib warrants a month of coverage the aforementioned deserves five years. But what purpose would that serve? None, from the media’s perspective. After all, it would have the effect of demonizing our enemies and presenting the entities – the USA and the Bush Administration – that vanquished a despotic regime and delivered its people from evil as a white knight on a white horse. And we can’t have that.
Because the media can’t have that – or, more precisely, won’t – they provide coverage that is scandalously unbalanced, and this warps people’s perspective. It demonizes America and that reduces the chances that the man on the street and the world community will support our war effort, and this can only reduce our chances of success. It inflames arab passions further and this can only lead to more loss of life, not only among our soldiers in the middle east but also among civilians who may fall prey to terrorist attacks. It also takes our collective eye further off the ball, for as it is most people don’t fully appreciate the magnitude of the threat posed to us by radical Islam. And what’s so tragic is that we’re not going to fully understand it because we’re being distracted by useful idiots in the media who make mountains out of molehills, like they’re doing with Abu Ghraib. As it stands right now, with a media guilty of extreme dereliction of duty, the only way the average person will gain perspective is if terrorists rain down a nuclear holocaust on an American city and immolate a million of our countrymen.
It’s utterly amazing how society has done a 180 degree about face. I remember seeing anti-Japanese propaganda footage from World War II; it truly demonized Imperial Japan and was designed to rally public support for the war effort. Today it would, no doubt, be labeled “racist.” But in those days people knew better what side their bread was buttered on, and the mainstream media didn’t comprise radical, 1960's malcontents who despise everything their country was founded upon. Consequently, whereas before we put the black hat on our enemy and the glowing white robe on ourselves, we now have media that do exactly the opposite. Where the media once tried to rally support for the second great war it now tries to rally opposition to what some would call the third. This is why I knew that support for the war would wane just as surely as I knew that most post-9/11 flags would be furled. I truly do not believe that we can prosecute a long-term war effectively anymore, for the enemies within aid and abet the enemies without. We won’t be able to, anyway, until we slay the inner demon of political-correctness and its minions in the media and elsewhere. But what will it take for us to emerge from our slumber and put that malevolent creature to the sword? I shudder to think.
