We entered the age of run-away self-righteousness a long time ago.
No matter how dastardly a thing is, the perpetrator of that thing will justify it by claiming that they are not, as common sense would lead you to believe, the scum of the earth, but they are in fact noble actors on the great stage of life who are doing this dastardly thing for what they claim is a greater good.
Thus, in the James Foley video, we have the scum of the earth ISIS member giving out with all his justifications, including, odd as this sounds that President Obama is in fact doing the deed, before he beheads an unarmed, bound man who is his helpless prisoner.
No matter the ugliness of the deed, the deed doer will claim that they are the best of us all, that they are, if truth be told, acting heroically.
Silence is the best friend of scums of the earth. What they need most is darkness and deeper darkness in which to commit their crimes against humanity. Those who call for us to turn our heads and refuse to allow the bitter truths of their brutal behavior to be known are, whether they realize it or not, their collaborators and defenders.
I’ve come across a smattering of articles calling for self-censorship in the press concerning ISIS. These people, who I am going to assume are well-meaning rather than villainous, are calling for the world media to stop telling us about the crimes that ISIS is committing. They are doing this on the dubious grounds that publishing ISIS’ crimes is “what ISIS wants.”
My response to this is simple and direct: Get real.
I don’t care what ISIS wants. I do care that people know the truth, even if the truth reeks, as the truth about ISIS certainly does.
We need to know that these butchers are committing genocide, that they are committing crimes so horrible that we cannot fathom them. We need to know who is funding them and who is backing them. And if it is Americans, we need to lock these people up and keep them there. We need to know because evil in all its forms flourishes in darkness and hides behind lies.
A news blackout on ISIS would be an unintended collaboration with ISIS. It would allow them to continue with their bestial behavior uninterrupted. It would abandon their victims in the most profound way possible; by pretending that they don’t exist.
It would also dishonor the memory of James Foley as nothing else could. James Foley gave his life in the telling of hard truths to a Western world that didn’t want to hear them. He, and his incredibly brave colleagues, are our eyes and ears in hell.
The idea of using his death as an opportunity to lobby for shutting down media coverage of the carnage ISIS is wreaking on innocent people profanes James Foley’s life, work and death.
James Foley is an American hero. He died for an American value, which is freedom of the press. He was a man of a faith, a practicing Catholic and, by the accounts of those who knew him, “a good, good person.”
His courage awes me.
If you get the chance to see the video of his ignoble execution, focus on that. Focus on the awesome courage of this American and contrast it with the cowardice of his braggart executioner. The man who killed James Foley did not have the courage to take him on man to man. He tied him hand and foot and put him on his knees. Then, the filthy ISIS coward had to hide himself behind a mask and clothes that would hide both his face and his physique.
I had trouble watching the video. But I have no problem whatsoever with saying that we the people need to know the truth of these things.
The truth is James Foley is an American hero; a man’s man in the best and most courageous sense of the word; someone who watched horrors with compassion and tried to give the rest of us the truth.
The sniveling little coward who killed him is the human scum of the earth.
That truth is plain to see in the video.
Another truth is that the American people deserve to know these things. The press has no business “self-censoring” the facts.
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