Nick Berg murder: Another Daniel Pearl moment

Atrocity, coming up

If anyone needs more clear proof that al-Qaida is the avowed enemy of Muslims all over the world, one need not look further than a grainy video on a jihadi website. Just as American officials were grappling with the aftermath of the Iraqi prison abuse scandal, just as more Americans than ever before think that invading Iraq was a mistake, just as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld came tantalizingly close to losing his job, and just as Bush’s popularity hit an all time low, al-Qaida ruins it all and grabs the moral low ground with a dramatic videotaped beheading of Nick Berg, an American telecommunications contractor. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, linked to al-Qaida as well as an aborted terrorist attack in Jordan, used the humiliation of Abu Ghraib prisoners as a cheap excuse to commit the ultimate crime, and Muslims around the world will pay the price as the “war on terror” is racheted up a notch. Given the searing power of images, the brutal murder of one innocent can seem to rise above others (i.e. innocents in Falluja who fell under sniper fire) who weren’t lucky enough to have cameras around. But it was that very same power that brought the prison scandal to the front pages, which certainly would have been a footnote without those pictures (and, we are told, the worse ones to come). Indeed, the democratization of digital images as well as their ubiquity has made sure that all the ugliness of war is just a Google search away. Which means that the Bush administration is forced to condemn acts committed by soldiers that would have certainly been ignored before, and we Muslims – yes, the peaceful ones – will have to rise up and condemn murders that we once thought weren’t our problem.

Shahed Amanullah is editor-in-chief of altmuslim.com.