Lara Logan and the wilding of the mob
The details of Lara Logan’s terrible treatment at the hands of an Egptian mob emerge, and they are about what one would have thought from previous accounts:
She was ripped away from her producer and bodyguard by a group of men who tore at her clothes and groped and beat her body. “For an extended period of time, they raped me with their hands,” Ms. Logan said in an interview with The New York Times. She estimated that the attack involved 200 to 300 men…My clothes were torn to pieces,” Ms. Logan said.
She declined to go into more detail about the assault but said: “What really struck me was how merciless they were. They really enjoyed my pain and suffering. It incited them to more violence.”
The fact that sexual violence could happen at the hands of a group is not so strange; group groping and even group rape (see this) is not unheard of. What is somewhat more unusual is that this sort of thing could happen in public with so many onlookers and press at hand (Logan herself, of course, being a press member). It is hard to escape the conclusion that Arab/NorthAfrican/Muslim culture’s misogyny and scarcely-repressed hostility towards women, especially Western women and their freedom, is at least partly to blame, although it is also at least somewhat encouraging that it was other elements in that same mob (reportedly some women and Egyptian soldiers) who saved her from what she thought would be a certain and prolonged death.
But what happened to Logan, terrible as it was, pales in comparison to this incident of mob violence, which received a lot less coverage. It didn’t happen to a famous journalist, and it wasn’t sexual in nature. At the beginning of the second intifada in 2000 two Israeli reservists had lost their way and mistakenly entered Ramallah, where they were apprehended by police and placed in a local prison for questioning. A Palestinian mob broke in, and some of the proceedings were captured by an Italian news team that managed to get some photos:
The soldiers were beaten, stabbed, had their eyes gouged out, and were disemboweled. At this point, a Palestinian (later identified as Aziz Salha), appeared at the police station window, displaying his blood-stained hands to the crowd, which erupted into cheers. One of the soldier’s bodies was then thrown out the window and stamped and beaten by the enraged mob. One of the bodies was set on fire. Soon after, the mob dragged the two mutilated bodies to Al-Manara Square in the city center as the crowd began an impromptu victory celebration.
Never heard of it? There’s a reason for that; they press was actively intimidated and co-opted:
In the days of the PLO state-within-a-state in Lebanon, PLO intimidation of journalists was flagrant, though rarely reported by the self-censoring Beirut-based press corps. As described by Zeev Chafets in his book Double Vision, Western journalists in Beirut were almost uniformly pro-Palestinian, those who were not having been driven out under threat of death.
Although it’s not congruent with the pretty narrative the press preferred to spout about the Egyptian demonstrators, the Lara Logan episode has made it more difficult to ignore the potential for violence at the hands of mobs in the Middle East. That danger is much worse if you’re a woman or a Jew, of course, and that’s no accident either. And unfortunately there will be few consequences for the perpetrators.
Edward Luttwak described the Arab world as an amoral society. Leon Uris in The Haj noted the same thing, as has Nora Darwish, Wafa Sultan, Bridgette Gabriel and many others. Indeed the war on terror can best be summarized as a war against the political culture of the middle east. Of course that would mean Bush was justified in going into Iraq to set up a democratic government and we can’t have that.
BTW Neo, I wish you mentioned some other things concerning the Palestinians:
1) the dancing in the streets of Nablus on 9/11.
2) the museum in Nablus celebrating the terrorist attack on a Sbarro’s pizza parlor in Jerusalem.
3) the first oversea phone call to a foreign head of state by President Obama was to Mahmoud Abbas, on day four of his administration.
Unfortunately it is beyond Obama’s reasoning capacity to realize that the last thing one wants to do during a war or terror is reward terrorism by setting up a state for the modern godfathers of terrorism.
I wonder if recent events influenced Obama to suspect that maybe the whole Middle eastern political culture is rotten and it’s not all George Bush’s fault? That’s a real toughie.
At the risk of beating the point to death: this is what tribal cultures do.
It’s not pretty. It’s not nice. There’s a REASON that selective quoting of the old testament is so popular with those who dislike Christianity.
Tribal is pretty dang ugly; it does a very good job of promoting the survival of Those In The Tribe, and if you’re tossed out, you’re not a person. (There is almost always a system to remove one from the tribe, although if it’s only by rejecting their membership or by killing them directly seems to vary widely.)
It’s a human impulse that we ignore at our own peril.
Heh, and BobfV beats me to it, and shorter, too: they’re amoral. (Sadly, this has to be qualified these days to say they do have a system of morality if you mean “system of right conduct”- it’s just more subjective.)
More and more I’ll go with Kurtz:
“There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’”
One can say, yup, that’s what they do.
Or pretend not to notice, because if you admitted that’s what they do, a good many things would have to be unsaid.
Sisyphus had it easy, compared to those awaiting some things being unsaid.
So…it doesn’t happen.
Foxfier – excellent point. I’ve been lately reading some of the old school scholars of tribal culture (for a totally different purpose than understanding the Middle East) – Frazer, Levy-Bruhl, Malinowski, etc. – and if I were to boil down the infinity of tales they tell of tribal practices the world over, I’d put it like this:
“Unremitting brutality.”
It is a world without tenderness – or I should say, what tenderness there is exists in the shadows, in private, in the interstices. That’s clear from reading the memoirs of the authors Bob from Virginia mentioned.
It is also a potent reminder for us of what the true revolution in the world really was – what David Bentley Hart claims is the only real revolution in history – that of the Christian message of universal personhood. Speaking as an agnostic, when I notice the divide between the tribal and the post-tribal, there really doesn’t seem to be any way to get from the former to the latter without some fundamental break with the idea that, as Foxfier put it, “if you’re tossed out, you’re not a person.”
We forget that basic lesson because it’s the very air we breathe. It’s like the fish swimming in the stream being asked, “How’s the water?” and replying, “What’s water?”
So, no way you beat that point to death. As Orwell famous wrote,
“We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
The Muslims are just following the very clear scriptures from the Koran: “Kill the unbelievers wherever you find them.” K 2:191 “Make war on the infidels living in your neighborhood.” K 9:123 “When opportunity arises, kill the infidels wherever you catch them.” K 9:5 “Any religion other than Islam is not acceptable.” K 3:85 “The Jews and the Christians are perverts; fight them.” K 9:30 “Maim and crucify the infidels if they criticize Islam” K 5:33.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that Arab/NorthAfrican/Muslim culture’s misogyny and scarcely-repressed hostility towards women
Make that ” … scarcely-repressed hostility towards everybody, apparently including each other.”
This is a society right up the liberal’s alley. Dumbed down dysfunctional conformist whose entreprenurial spirit of rape and pillage doesn’t produce economic inequality.
I remember seeing glowing reports from almost enamoured newscasters of various media outlets on how well behaved the Tahrir Square protesters were- and incidentally one report was on the day after Logan was attacked-CBS had not yet released the story- but surely the journalists on the ground knew what had happened or they are not worth the fabulous pay packets that they take home.Would the coverage have been any different had the journalists been covering a demonstration in the West by,say, anarchists and a similar outrage been perpetrated?The urge almost seems to be to dissociate the obvious-that Logan was attacked by a predominantly Muslim mob because she happened to be white-and try to portray the attack in almost abstract terms even by the victim herself, who speaks about how she came to notice about the plight of Egyptian women in public places after what she went through why totally disregarding the fact that no similar cases of outrage had been reported against Egyptian women by the “good folks” at Tahrir Square.
Italian anarchist and International Solidarity Movement activist Vittorio Arrigoni was ritually murdered in Gaza -apparently by Salafists who are described as “extremists” by Hamas (which probably means that they want the
IsraelisJews dead yesterday rather than have them dead today,as Hamas would)-for his openly gay lifestyle.Not unpredictably, the ISM has blamed Israel’s closure of Gaza for the murder and even gone as far as announcing another Gaza convoy,this time to honour Arrigoni’s work.However, the parallel between Arrigoni’s murder and Logan’s experience is the eagerness with which journalists have gone to sanitize the story.In the case of the latter, at least this was understandable as the journalists could hardly be expected to be objective when reporting on a colleague and may have deferred to the wishes of the victim.Whereas in Arrigoni’s case, the eagerness amongst journalists to get past the incident is almost palpable.
Given that the same tendency had been exhibited by journalists when reporting similar attacks-the extreme torture of some of the victims of Mumbai terror attacks readily springs to mind with a police officer having been quoted as saying that he had never come across such cold-blooded brutality in his entire career-
there is a clear pattern of minimizing the magnitude of crimes carried out by Islamists.As to the reasons for this-other than overt political correctness no other reason seems possible,but why so is a question that needs to be explored.
Barry Rubin has a devastating little post at PJM today on the subject of the media (particularly the Times) and Egypt:
http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/2011/04/29/u-s-government-media-completely-wrong-on-egypt-now-advise-on-peace-process/
The last thought experiment is one of the most effective rhetorical devices I’ve seen that exposes, like a slap to the face and a “Wake up, man!”, just how irresponsible and dangerous the media has become.
At least we know our front-line infantrywomen will be treated more humanely so we need to proceed with sexually integrating the Direct Combat Probability Code (DCPC) 1 MTOE positions… After all, without front-line, continued combat experience, women can’t get the medals they need to get promoted.
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It is true that within all cultures a mob is capable of great cruelty. Yet, as others have noted, Arab culture is particularly violent and definitely misogynistic. This is true to varying levels in all muslim nations.
Bob from Va has put it succinctly:
“Indeed the war on terror can best be summarized as a war against the political culture of the middle east.”
At Camp David in 2000 Barak granted Arafat everything he wanted. Everything.
The result was the Second Intifada.
When dealing with the Middle East
The eggheaded libs I’ve seen and heard talking about the Egyptian coup have painted it as a true democratic revolution, which can only be positive. Right? Well not necessarily. The mob action where Ms. Logan was so brutally handled can also be classified as democracy. It was an action taken by unanimous consent of the perpetrators. In a pure democracy 51 percent of the population could legitimately vote to send 49 percent to the gas chambers, or to rape, maul and kill them if they prefer. Democracy as a means of orderly transition of the government is desirable. Democracy as the sole means of conducting government has it’s limitations. The democratic republic is a great invention and about the only really new political idea in a couple thousand years. And yet the “progressives” think they have a better idea. Go figure…
“surely the journalists on the ground knew what had happened or they are not worth the fabulous pay packets that they take home”
I’m picking door #2.
Social interaction in Arab world is a war of all against all. An Arab saying tells it all: “I am with my brothers against my cousins. A am with my cousins against my neighbours. I am with my neighbours against everybody else”.
It worth to remember the curse given to progeny of Ishmael in Bible: “He will live like wild donkey, hating everybody and hated by everybody”.
I had a great dream the other night. The Shiite and Sunni tribes focused their agenda again on each other, leaving the rest of the world alone. The U.S. sold WMD’s to both sides, sat back, and watched.
Their shared hatred of Jews and the west is all that prevents that from happening.
it not unusal if you know the cultuer and you dont walk around pretending that you can do what you do in your culture in theirs.
she was no wearing the veil, and so she was fair game for that stuff.
this is why gang rapes are now prevalent in malmo… and why police and ambulance wont go into areas there… (england and other parts of europe have no go enclaves too)
but due to multi culti laws, they cant do anything about it… not even write about it in the news (we are following. ever notice that they tell you “be on the look out for a criminal, we cant tell you what they look like that would be racism… good luck”)
1. I wish Logan a full psychic recovery from her trauma.
2. The capacity to take pleasure in cruelty and the instinct to gang up on the vulnerable are widespread, even if latent or unrecognized, because they often work.
Dismantle Western civilization and we’ll all live happily ever after? I can see a brutal darwinian pragmatism in cruelty and mobbing, but I’m stumped about the underlying basis for multicultural insanity.
“Before the assault, Ms. Logan said, she did not know about the levels of harassment and abuse that women in Egypt and other countries regularly experienced.”
Whew!
Multicultural insane women, meet Ishmael!
Look up the glowing reporters speaking about the now defunct Atlanta spring break event called freaknik. How it was an event welcomed by the City. And the reason it was finally called off. The narrative about a peoples fun for all was basically a cover up of lewdness, theft, vandalism and rape. But then again the same could be said for New Orleans Mardi Gras.
I find it interesting that most of the focus of the story has been on the dangers ‘female REPORTERS face.’ And not on the brutality against women in those Islamic strongholds – burkhas because apparently the men cannot control their urges, unimaginable restrictions, no school, “honor” killings, forced circumcision, beheadings, stonings with women buried in sand, with young men jockeying for position with their cell phones to get a good shot of the cinder block crushing her skull… Lara Logan was lucky, if you consider what could have happened.
Lara Logan almost said nothing, and claims that she will say no more, because she “doesn’t want this to define her” – what a shame. Because she is finally awakened and in a position to finally tell the story, and be heard, in a way that no one else can be heard. Things happen for a reason, maybe her task is to finally elevate the plight of women in those countries so that the bright light of day shines on this horror, and it can be eradicated forever.
I believe in a just God and hell. There will be consequences and punishment for these folks far worse than any we could exact.
Christianity and Judaism try to take our innate tendencies toward violence, lust, covetousness, sadism, and cruelty and to moderate/eliminate them, and to redirect that energy toward more peaceful and constructive ends. Islam, on the other hand, takes these baser instincts, inflames them, sanctifies them, and directs them outward against the unbelievers, in the service of world wide conquest.
Thus, our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, when caught, are often sadistically tortured, dismembered, killed, and defiled in truly horrific ways, but these horrific atrocities by Muslims driven by hatred and sadism–apparently pretty common–are, it seems, filtered out of our news, and we only rarely hear some of the details.
Islam deliberately creates such hate-filled, sadistic, psychopathic killers–who believe that to be such a person is what Allah wants and has sanctified, and that to torture and kill an Infidel is an entirely praiseworthy, holy, and sacred act–because creating such rabid killers, such Muslims, was what Muhammad thought would enable Islam to achieve its goal of conquering the entire world.
For Egypt, an occurrence to be expected by anyone who hasn’t settled for the Leftist-controlled mainstream media as the sole source of knowledge about Islamic society. For Israel, expected too, by virtue of being in this neighborhood, and because of a leadership more fearing the kangaroo court in The Hague than having the interests of the Jewish people in their hearts.
But tell me, please: What possesses a nation-state formerly free of this problem, and not even in its vicinity, to import it to its shores? I’m talking not just about the daily litany of horror endured by the indigenous of Western Europe, as meticulously documented by sites like Gates of Vienna, but also recently of the United States of America:
Dearborn, Michigan: America’s First Sharia-Compliant Muslim Enclave?
For a safe and contented people to change their situation into one of constant insecurity and fear by their own hands is nothing but insanity. No, it can’t be. I know the people–neither in Europe nor in the U.S.–never asked for such a thing. Then it is not insanity but a scandal; the scandal that leaders who go against the entire national interest are able to stay in power, and that those who speak against such leaders are themselves castigated with various names, not least of which is the R-word.
P.S.–It is not only active jihadis we are talking about, but about a whole Muslim culture steeped in hatred, violence, and sadism that produces and accepts, enables, encourages, and applauds them. There are a whole series of warping socialization processes that exist in the Muslim world that encourage this fanaticism, violence, and sadism.
For instance, there are the sexually perverse and harsh Muslim child rearing practices noted in Raphael Patai’s “The Arab Mind,” published in 1973 (and revised in 1983), before such probing investigations were considered too un-politically correct, embarrassing, or dangerous to conduct. Things like the widespread practice of Female Genital Mutilation–a recent UN report estimated that 96% of all married women in Egypt had been subjected to this barbaric practice ( see http://egypt.unv.org/what-we-do/projects/doc/female-genital-mutilation.html), the little reported problems with widespread inbreeding and high levels of genetic defects, and endemic and routine pederasty in the Muslim world, as well as the training techniques used in many Madrassas–there are supposedly more than 10,000 such Saudi-funded Madrassas in Pakistan alone–which deliberately impose and heighten sexual frustration in their pubescent male students, in order to increase and harness this sexual frustration, rage, and energy, and to channel it into fanaticism, sadism, and violence against the enemies of Islam i.e unbelievers.
Mix all of these perverse and violent “socializing” processes (and many more that I am sure I have missed) together and you get what might be called “feral people/populations/societies.” Thus the 17,134 (that is this morning’s total, check back later and it will usually be higher, and it mounts higher each day. See http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/) Muslim terrorist attacks world-wide since 9/11.
Particularly spectacular examples that come to mind beside 9/11 are the 2004 terrorist attack against elementary school children at Beslan in which hundreds of children and adults were beaten, raped and killed and many more children who escaped death probably traumatized for life (see http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2010/08/six-year-terrible-anniversary-beslan-jihad.html). Then there was the prolonged and horrific three hour torture, sexual mutilation, and disembowelment of three Christians in Turkey back in 2007 (see http://www.christiantoday.com/article/turkey.christian.missionaries.horrifically.tortured.before.killings/10523.htm). This premeditated, tremendously horrific and gory atrocity, carried out in the town of Malatya by several young Muslims–including the Mayor’s son–somehow never got the kind of world-wide MSM coverage that it certainly deserved, and the much delayed and often recessed trial still drags on, and the perps have still not been actually tried and sentenced.
Then, there was the extended, multi-day torture of a young Jewish man, Ilan Halimi, in France a few years ago, when he was lured into a trap by a Muslim girl, and then held for ransom and tortured for days by a Muslim gang in a crowded apartment building–of course, the other Muslim tenants “heard nothing” –before being dumped in a trash dump, dying shortly thereafter (see http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/ilan_halimi_islamic_jew_hatred_in_france/). And. of course, the beheading of Daniel Pearl should also be on this list.
In Kenya in 2008, there was the Christian church full of worshipers that was surrounded by Muslims and set on fire, incinerating the men, women, and children inside and those who tried to escape the burning building were hacked to death with machetes by the Muslim supporters of the Marxist and Muslim Raila Odinga, the so-called “Butcher of Kenya,” the “cousin” that Obama and Michelle went over to Kenya and campaigned for, on our dime, while Obama was a sitting U.S. Senator, provoking a diplomatic protest by the Kenyan government over Obama’s interference in internal Kenyan affairs (http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/kenyas_killing_fields/) .
Finally, of course, there is “Palestinian” society in general, really more like a society of “Orcs,” of which the most recent example of their rabid and feral nature is the violent and bloody nighttime murders of a sleeping Israel family of five (mother, father and three children), including the decapitation of their three month old son, which was a cause for joy and satisfaction among the nearby Muslim population, with celebration in the streets and the handing out of celebratory candy (see http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/206769.php).
Are these normal people, with normal outlooks, attitudes, preoccupations, and behaviors? Do the mobs they form, the things they believe, the thoughts they scream, and their bloody, violent, and sadistic acts resemble what we believe, think, and do, or what we would enable or tolerate?
I don’t think so.