Apparently, some readers are taking issue with my prose, like Aaron back here who writes:
Actually, you are completely out to lunch on your analysis. :P
The fact that they are Christian is incidental to them being members of a Christian school. If they were at an Islamic, Hindu or Jewish school, the headline would reflect this fact.
Christians have been beheaded throughout history, and a beheading is the ultimate symbol of martyrdom for a Christian.
I was going to revisit this issue, anyway, so now seems like as good a time as any.
Not surprisingly, a fair number of Wankerville blogs have gone ballistic over this incident (for reasons that still escape me since most of these same bloggers have shown precious little sympathy for, say, the tens of thousands hacked to death by machete during the genocide in Rwanda -- ah, the joys of relativism.)
Consider, if you will, Canada's own Dimwit in the Great White North™, who really gets into it here and reproduces some of the original coverage of the incident (emphasis added):
Three teenage Christian girls were beheaded and a fourth was seriously wounded in a savage attack on Saturday by unidentified assailants in the Indonesian province of Central Sulawesi.
The girls were among a group of students from a private Christian high school who were ambushed while walking through a cocoa plantation in Poso Kota subdistrict on their way to class, police Major Riky Naldo said.
Notice anything missing? Why, yes -- any mention of the identity of the attackers, so it's impossible to tell if this was a religiously-motivated crime, or one committed entirely at random. If you don't know who the perps are, how can you possibly suggest it had anything to do with the religious affiliation of the victims? Maybe those girls were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Who's to say?
And yet, if you have the stomach for it, go back and read Dimwit's article, in which he goes on and on and tediously on about Islam terrorism and slavery and "perparing this land for the expansion of Islam," all based on absolutely no evidence of religious motivation whatsoever.
You know, given that Dimwit is today's featured guest star over at Pajama Wankers LLC, I can't wait to see the kind of swill that's going to start coming out of that site November 16.
2 comments:
CC:
Notice anything missing? Why, yes -- any mention of the identity of the attackers, so it's impossible to tell if this was a religiously-motivated crime, or one committed entirely at random. If you don't know who the perps are, how can you possibly suggest it had anything to do with the religious affiliation of the victims? Maybe those girls were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Who's to say?
You're really gerrymandering here. Have a read of some other articles, like THIS one, which states:
Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim nation, but Central Sulawesi has a roughly equal number of Muslims and Christians. The province was the scene of a bloody sectarian war in 2001-2002 that killed around 1,000 people from both communities.
At the time, beheadings, burnings and other atrocities were common.
A government-mediated truce succeeded in ending the conflict in early 2002, but there have since been a series of bomb attacks and assassinations of Christians. These included a blast at a market in Poso, a predominantly Christian town, that killed 22 people in May.
Christian leaders have repeatedly accused authorities in Jakarta of not doing enough to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice.
The Christian-Muslim conflict in Sulawesi was an extension of a wider sectarian war in the nearby Maluku archipelago in which up to 9,000 perished between 1999 and 2002.
In all likelihood it was a religiously motivated killing. It's the symbolism of the killings that's shocking. Three innocents killed in a fashion that carries with it religious symbolism that is similar to crucifixion.
If these girls were crucified, would that be because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time? I'm just saying that a beheading is as intense as this. If they were gunned down, it wouldn't be causing such a stir.
In all likelihood it was a religiously motivated killing.
I have no doubt that it was, but that's not the point. The point is that the original article made no claim as to the motive -- the residents of Wankerville simply assumed that and proceeded to froth at the mouth about it. But that's not all.
For the sake of argument, let's pretend it was clearly religiously motivated. That still doesn't explain the rabid obsession with this story.
If the wankersphere were all that upset by religious and/or ethnic killings, why were they so thoroughly uninterested in the genocide in Rwanda, for example?
800,000 killed in Rwanda in three months? Oh, yawn. Three Christian schoolgirls beheaded in Indonesia? Holy goddamned fucking shit! It's an outrage!
I trust you see my point.
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