Scandinavian correspondent Rune, who appears to be quite a polyglot, sent us this message last week:
Here’s a French piece dating from before the battle of Fallujah; I didn’t see it on any of the blogs, in fact never saw it in an English translation. It’s out-of-date now of course, but sometimes it’s worth revisiting old horrors so as to congratulate oneself that things really are going in the right direction. Also to remember that we have not, and shall never, forget Nick Berg’s killers and who we’re dealing with. This month [April] it’s a year ago.
After staying for six months in Iraq after the end of the war, French journalist Sara Daniels managed to set up a meeting with the Islamic executioners hiding in Fallujah. | |
Marseille, France | |
The large report makes your spine shiver. The journalist Sara Daniels of the French weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur [The New Observer] finally managed to set up a meeting with the Islamists whom have abducted and killed several foreign hostages in the recent months. | |
Inside their Fallujah headquarters — Fallujah where American troops have not dared venture since their withdrawal April 29 — they are laughing about why they have cut the throats of the hostages and why the world can expect more hostage taking in the future: it works. | |
“I’m responsible for the decapitation of the American agent Nicolas Berg, of the Korean Kim Sun-il and of other Iraqi spies working for the Americans” says the chief of the new military top command of the Islamic groupings – a man of about 30 years, whose name in the article has been changed to Abou Rachid. | |
Video with Murder | |
Sara Daniels listened with growing horror to the laughs and taunts of Abou Rachid and his recommendations that she watch the DVD the murder of Nicolas Berg twice — then she’ll get used to it. Meanwhile he offers her to participate in the next. Abou Rachid denies that foreign troops control the struggle against the Americans. After the American withdrawal Fallujah is considered the first liberated city of Iraq; an Islamic emirate. The chiefs for 13 Islamic groups have installed a religious regime of terror with summary execution of opponents, spies or people who will not subject to the draconian Islamic rules. According to the leaders, all the Islamic groups now cooperate and abdications and attacks are planned and staged from Fallujah. | |
The Method Works | |
“We don’t abduct people to scare them, we withhold, but solely to put pressure on the countries which help the Americans. They cooperate with the Americans because of economic interests, but their contracts are stained with the blood of Iraqis. Should we merely fold our hands while they murder us? It is not a good thing to decapitate people. But it is a method which works” says Abou Rachid and continue: “Just look at the just reaction of the Philippines. Thanks to their attitude we could free the hostage and show the world that we too love peace and leniency. I by the way tried to negotiate a transfer of Nick Berg with Iraqi prisoners, but the Americans refused. So they are the ones truly responsible for his death.” | |
According to Abou Rachid, the 13 Islamic groups have different tasks, but they have centralised inside Fallujah the hostage negotiations and the struggle across the whole of Iraq, the better to be able to increase the number of attacks and coordinate future attacks and show their strength. The Islamic leader acknowledges that many foreign Arab holy warriors participate in the fight on their side, but deny that the attacks are controlled by foreigners. When several of the hostages have been executed by Arab warriors it, according to Abou Rachid, is because they have reached a higher religious level. | |
“But little by little the Iraqis learn to imitate their Arab brothers” he says and promise the struggle will not end before the occupation has ended and Islamic Sharia introduced into Iraq. | |
Prophetic Preaching | |
Sara Daniels also interviewed the extremist Islamic religious leader, imam Janabi, who with satisfaction tell her that he already in a preaching in 1996 predicted that an American invasion would first finish off Saddam Hussein and then the American themselves. On tours through Fallujah, it quickly become obvious to Sara Daniels that the Islamic warriors are in possession of all actual powers and that the Iraqi security forces, which according to the ceasefire agreement, should control the security after the American withdrawal are simple irrelevant. |
“Higher religious level” huh?! Oh yeah, Religion of Peace. Anyway, Sara Daniels is a very courageous woman, and the lessons are clear; never give in to threats and never negotiate with hostage takers. Also this is a fight to the end. There can be no negotiations and never any settlement with such men.
— Rune
For a bunch of religious zealots, these guys sure don’t practice chivalry. Their carnal lusts and morbid brutality seems to be rationalized into obscene existence by the all knowing, all hateful, servants of God. A very bloodthirsty and vengeful God at that.
But I can think of reptiles no lower than the likes of Sara Daniels, that she saw pure evil in the eye, and did not scream from the building tops, that this was murder most foul, and that it’s perpetrators, had at last, parted from the community of man.
Well I must disagree. Sometimes the best way to damn a man is to throw him in the air and watch him hurt himself when he hits the ground. Or, to be more precise, a cold and detached description of the raw and unembellished facts, when the facts so clearly speak for themselves. The words and acts of these terrorists need no adjectives from Sara Daniels, and I think a strong moral evaluation from her would only have distracted from the story. Even so, I think it’s clear where her sentiments lie by the mere fact that she choose to publish such an obvious horrid account. No sane man could ever but support their eradication after having read it. Sara Daniels did scream murder most foul, she just did it in a way that was harder to dismiss as partisan propaganda.
I’m most struck by the easy acknowledgment of the reasons the do as they do; it works. Well then, it’s most clear that the way to stop it is to make sure it doesn’t work – don’t negotiate, never pay off. Or as Kipling had it: Pay the Danegeld and you never rid of the Dane.
Dymphna:
Thank you for your comment on my blog; I really enjoy getting them! Yours especially because it challenged me and encouraged me to go to God’s word. I think I should have rephrased what I said about conquering in a different way though. My mom also pointed out to me that we conquer in love and that is how God works in us and enables us to bring justice and truth to our enemies. That is more what I meant. Here are some verses on conquering; Romans 8:37- Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. Revelation 17:14- These will make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb will overcome (or in some versions conquer) them, for He is the Lord of lords and the King of kings; and those who are with are called chosen, and faithful. NKJ
So thank you for challenging me.
Conquering in love, 🙂
Jennifer
P.S. I think your blog is realy cool. you guys are really smart!
Fair enough Rune,
May be she put the information out there nice and devoid of passion. But does it not disturb you that it is this very “media” attention that the Islamic throat cutters are out to obtain in the first place? Does not the reporter become part of the story when it is unmitigated terror that is being disseminated? Is not the message really: “Mess with us and this is what will happen to you. Go home, and if you population demonstrates in the streets against their government, then Allah, the almighty might show his mercy”. The intended audience for this kind of news are the people who think the USA had 9/11 coming and that if we don’t mend our ways, we will be rightly slaughtered by the servants of an outraged God.
Le Nouvel Observateur, AFP, Reuters, AP, et al have become the outsourced ministries of propaganda for Islamic murderers. So Sara Daniels was brave…suicide bombers are brave…they just expect different rewards in the end.
I’m not certain what they terrorists in Fallujha wanted, I doubt they themselves knew, however if this is the image of themselves they wanted disseminated, then they, like that half-witted Osama boy, should beware what they wish for, lest it come true. Also I think you overestimate their abilities. These are not media savvy New York media moguls. These are illiterate dregs crawled in from the sewers of a society that has sanctified stupidity and for whom cassette tapes with hateful sermons by Saudi imams is the pinnacle of media perfection. I doubt they are thinking about what message they are sending to the world, or able to control it if they were. Actually I think the Islamic terrorists are often overrated, even mythologized. Osama bin Laden is not some super genius terrorist icon. Osama is a goofy looking half wit with a weak insecure ego, way in over his head. I bet women and being made fun of scares him more than anything. So it is with these guys. They are not trying to send a complicated political message to the world. They’re mostly talking to themselves and each other. And I have never seen such a blatant, if entirely unintentional, self-damnation as this piece in any of Reuters, AP or any other more widely circulated media – precisely because those would never wish or dare put Islam in such a bright light. I think it is important that we get the message out there that these are not the run of the mill patriotic rebels fighting the noble cause for their country, but maniac killers fuelled by a Religion of Hatred.
Rune, I think you are generally right, especially about the lower-level jihadis. But I think that some of the higher-level guys, like al-Zarqawi and al-Zawahiri, may be intelligent, ruthless, cynical manipulators, playing the game in order to create those gangster mini-states that Wretchard was talking about, with themselves in charge. All the women they want, lots of guns and explosives, kill anyone that gets in their way, and live the high life of pillage and extortion. All of this with noble Islam as the cover. “We do it all for the sake of the faith, God willing”.
Picking out and eliminating these creepy masterminds has got to be our most important task.