Tuesday, November 16, 2004
What we are fighting against
It gets so easy to abstract it all, to see this as just another Delta Force movie, an action adventure film where our good guys will go in and save the day.
But this is not a Hollywood job. Bruce Willis nor Schwartzenager nor Rambo will be coming to save the day. This is a place where real people are butcherd. Real people have their eyes put out under Taliban style Sharia law, their hands removed, their daughters raped. Real people are kidnapped, tortured, executed.
Sometimes, there is a moment that drives this home. Today for me, was seeing a picture of Margaret Hassan, not too pretty, aging, but pleasant. She did good work. She tried to be a help. I wept for her.
Then I ran across this piece:
The video was of a Russian soldier getting his head sawed off in Chechnya. I mentioned in the script that it took a minute. The bureau chief here asked me to time it out. In fact it took two minutes, five seconds. This detail made it worse. I changed the script. I could not use the video, but I could use the audio. I would use pictures of young French Muslims watching the tape. They were being recruited to fight against U.S. forces in Iraq.
The bureau chief asked about the audio — if it was a cry, as I had written in the script. I told him it was not a cry. It was a scream that turned into a gurgle when the blood got in his windpipe. A woman in the office made a sound.
I worked on the edit in my hotel room on a laptop computer in the afternoon. It was still sunny out. On the screen a young Russian soldier was being killed. To take the audio I had to see the video. I set an in-point on the edit where he began his scream, then set another point to lower the audio so you could hear the reporter's track.
I had to do this several times to get it right. At one point I covered most of my eyes with my left hand and hit the edit button with my right hand. I could see just a little piece of the screen and out loud I found myself saying, "Oh God I'm so sorry."
by Steve Harrigan.
My heart breaks. What sort of world are we creating? Western culture that wallows in artificial death and evil and sexual perversion in the movies and TV, and abortion and euthanasia, and attempts to destroy all that is good and considered holy because it interfers with play and hides from the reality that your relativism creates, and a Moslem way that perverts the good of Islam and which is wallowing in death and letting the youth drink in snuff pics, and chosing the dark and repudiating the good to get back at a world that gave them a sense of inferiority, or threatens their sense of control or something.
Are these the two choices you are giving me? Flip sides of the same coin. I repudiate them both. A pox on both your heads.
