“The concept of a society is based on the quality of its mercy, of its sense of fair play, its sense of justice.” So Billy Hayes told his inhuman and inhumane Turkish jailers in “Midnight Express” (a film that surely represents Hollywood’s heyday).
Hayes’s (essentially Christian) protest against a merciless authority now, sadly, applies to the US (“NATO”) and its adopted surrogates around the world.
Once again the US is supervising, and/or lending imprimatur, to a French-Revolution like upheaval in a Muslim country.
(The blood-drenched, illiberal, irreligious French Revolution, of course, bore no philosophical resemblance to the American Revolution.) Repulsive (deeply silly) Western journalists are darting about cheering like groupies for the amorphous entity the same “tards” have termed “Rebels.” America helped kill-off the extended family of Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi, who is on the lam, small children included. Now we’re whooping it up for those who want to do the same to Qaddafi.
Naturally, our enlightened “leaders” said not a word about the quality of justice former Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak is receiving in another court that is masquerading as a court of law, but seeks to oblige the masses. This set-up (down to the caged defendant) also more closely resembles the French Revolutionary Tribunal, meting justice mercilessly by popular demand.
Under American auspices a stoic Saddam Hussein, noose about his neck, was hung (and heckled by a hooded Shiite executioner). Even more repugnant than that hasty hanging were the US-sponsored legal proceedings that preceded it. (All the obligatory denunciations of Hussein obtain here, naturally. Bad man. Bad man. Bad man.) That Tribunal, which was branded “made-in-America,” also had more in common with the French Revolutionary Assembly’s methods.
As Hayes said in that memorable scene, asking mercy from the merciless is “like asking a bear to sh-t in a toilet.”
UPDATE I: In answer to TL on Facebook: Would you feel you’d gotten due process sitting in a cage in court, being tried by the Muslim Brotherhood? Why the trials? Why not just begin your democracy with a pardon? I’m not the Christian; you guys are. What did i quote in the beginning of the post? If these new, Middle-East regimes are so magnificent, why not be munificent? Forgive and spend your money on building your society, not prosecuting crimes for which evidence in a court of law is impossible to muster.
UPDATE II: Compassionate Fascist: Yes, why haven’t anti-Semites like yourself (and others who bayed about the Jews having brought about an invasion of Iraq) pointed toward the Arab neoconservatives pushing lies about Libya in the media?
Fouad The Awful Ajami is not the only Arab agitating for ever more intervention.
UPDATE III (Sept. 5): “Crimes Against Libya – Redux.”