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BAGHDAD GIGGLES
The Arab Street responds to Saddam’s underpants humiliation:
They’re laughing at Saggy Hussein. AP reports:
Hamza Adnan, 8, Jinan Jassim, Ayah Faiz, 5, and Duha Munaf, 16, from left, watch Dubai-based satellite television station al-Arabiya in a house in the Karada area of Baghdad, Friday May 20, 2005, as it broadcasts Friday’s front page of Britain’s mass circulation tabloid newspaper, the Sun, showing Saddam Hussein standing in his white underwear while folding what appears to be a brown pair of trousers.
The Sun should launch an Arab-language edition. Looks like they’ve got a large potential readership.
During the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam was near the fighting when a death-commando squad came after him. He grabbed an AK and told Uday to bring him a red shirt. Donning his red shirt he waiting until his republican guard defeated the Iranians, then he shot a few innocent bystanders to celebrate. After torturing a nearby old woman to death he told Uday ‘I put on my red shirt just now so if I got wounded, no one would know and they would keep fighting bravely. Smart, eh?’.
The next time the Iranians attacked, Saddam, Qusay and Uday all put on red shirts and waited until the attack was quelled and the celebratory innocent-bystander-shooting began before they changed clothing. This went on throughout the war until it became a custom, any attack would cause the Al-Tikritii-Hussein clan to call for their red shirts.Then came Desert Storm. Saddam no longer called for his red shirt. Instead, he began a new custom of calling for his dark brown pants. And you can see that he still follows that custom today.
And the thing is, the broadcast of that photo probably did more harm to the insurgent cause than six airstrikes. Harder to get even the dumbest young Sunni to stand up for a dumpy, half-nekkid old clown…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 05 22 at 08:11 PM • permalinkI hate Paris,
I hate France,
But I love seeing Saddam in his underpants…Posted by NorthGaTom on 2005 05 22 at 10:16 PM • permalinkThere’s no outrage here because that’s not the “Arab Street”.
That’s the “Arab Living Room”, or possibly the “Arab Parlor”.
Posted by zeppenwolf on 2005 05 22 at 10:29 PM • permalinkI would like to know in what way these photos are a breach of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners. Try telling that to the relatives of all the Kurds, Iranians and Iraquis gassed by Saddam.
It isn’t even a breach of taste. For that to happen maybe, he’d have to be naked and hooded, crawling around in a dog collar, or with electrodes attached to his balls. Now there’s a pictue for The Sun!
I find it disappointing that the sob sisters so often trivialisee important issues, as in Saddam in his underpants is an outrage and another huge nail in the coffin of human rights.
And is another MSM telling porkies in that the Sun claims they were given the photo by the US military to show what an old broken man Saddam is, and the US military strongly denies it.
I am not sure how a picture of him in his underpants would show him as broken. It does certainly show him as a person who need no longer be feared by the Iraqis. And as it was they whom he murdered, not the cacophany of voices bemoaning his humiliation, then I would consider their judgement important and not the self appointed moral arbiters of the west.
To trivialise myself it looks like they are providing him with hair dye, and a hairdresser? Hope he pays for it out of his own pocket. He actually looks like he is being treated well. Iraqis struggling with power and water interruptions from the insurgents might like to be wearing such snowy white underpants.AlJazeera said they would not show this.
It is just too painful for the Iraqis to see this.
too humiliating.
Now if it were a man slowly cutting off someone’s head while he screamed God is Grat in Arabic….. no problem…. no reason why any self respecting Muslim should have a problem with seeing and hearing that.
Or if it were a street strewn with body parts and debris and puddled with blood they would deem that fit for viewing by the kiddies.
Or if it were the video of an unarmed civilian being forced to beg for his/her life while being menaced by masked gunmen… ok fine…. nothing offensive there.
riots and flag burning and mobs of manic raving people..yep ok fine.
grieving people burying loved ones murdered by suicide bombers…fair game.
The bodies of Americans being hanged from a bridge, let’s put that on a loop and show it over and over and over and over.
But Saddam in his underwear? Well they have their standards you know.
screw em.
One of the reasons why I think it might be a fake, they’re not going to give him hair dye, certainly not enough to dye his chest hair as well.
But hey, they seem to be enjoying it, I’m not about to spoil their well deserved fun.
Posted by Aging Gamer on 2005 05 22 at 11:46 PM • permalinkI also think fake due hair dye, or lack of.
I say hurry up and hand the problem over to the new Iraqi Government. There will be plenty of pictures for all then. Wonder if Al Qaeda, sorry Jazeera, TV will run those.
Posted by Dean McAskil on 2005 05 23 at 12:10 AM • permalinkThis issue is one of the most ludicrous of the many farces we are subjected to in the name of “human rights”.
Charles Glass of the Independent tells us
“No one need feel sorrow for Saddam Hussein, who in many eyes incarnates diabolic evil. His crimes themselves condemn him. That does not excuse demolishing the edifice of international and humanitarian law to depose and humiliate him. We must feel sorrow, not for the tyrant, but for our loss of international order enshrined in the Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter. The United States and its British acolytes have brushed international law - and the protections it implied for us all - to pursue their crusade to control Iraq and intimidate its neighbours. Saddam’s underwear is not the issue. Law is.”
Thus the most important issue is the law, not our law take note but the Geneva Convention and the UN Charter. Clearly it is not possible for all matters of humanity to stand without conflict. This chap is telling us that holy of holies, international law, shall take precedence over all other concerns of peoples.
Who owns the law. I know that this is a complex and critical matter, nevertheless moments of madness where Saddam may sue and be able to go into a British Court to seek financial redress for being seen in his undies, while all those millions he killed will never be compensated for his murder of their own, leave me despairing, and knowing that clearly we the people don’t own the law. We wouldn’t be that stupid.
Then there is Glass’s argument that this is a balance between beating up on the old s*t for immoral reasons, as he clearly says, and that great abstract, and controller of us all, the law. Well the law as designated by a breed of international lawyers and friends who are so distant from us and our considerations of what is just, as to make the law our oppressor rather than our instrument for our protection, is ceasing to be the law for me. The law depends upon public confidence in lawfully constituted authority, I am losing that faith in international law and national law if “it” is allowed to intrude and decide.
If one is unhappy with my irritation with Glass’s pompous words consider Abraham Lincoln’s,“We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not mean the same thing;... The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the world denounces him for the same act; ... Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon the definition of liberty.” Not only is the wolf not happy, it seems he may be able to “cut the sheep’s throats” once again, ably assisted by the self appointed arbiters of the peoples morality.
I have concluded that there should be an addition to the lexicon of law in the form of Asimov’s three laws.
First Law: A government and its judicial branch/United Nations may not injure a citizen, or, through inaction, allow a citizen to come to harm, with the rider that if a choice must be made if injury may fall on one if prevented to another, that evil shall be treated as such and not hold preference over a citizen.
Second Law: A government and its judicial branch/United Nations must obey orders given it by citizens except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Third Law: A government and its judicial branch/United Nations must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
The UN and the “international” elite is quick enough declare that it is all for the rights of the people if they are bewailing the evil of Israel, the US or the UK, or giving Saddam succour. Their’s is a position which would leave them obliged to argue that if Hitler was reincarnated he wouldn’t be able to get a fair trial because of all the negative publicity.International Law is like any law. It can be an ass, and does need amendment from time to time.
Those who bleat loudest about it seem to be those who, conveniently, only decry tyrants when they seem to be receiving something from the US, not when they are casting their vote in the UN, or going about their “ordinary” business of making people miserable. If Castro was a mate of the US they would make a fuss. But since he is (for some unfathomable reason) still a left ikon - despite sucking up to the USSR, now Chavez, exporting soldiers to Africa to assist in civil wars (as if they needed help for that), and maintaining poverty in many forms in Cuba - he is never identified as a tyrant by the left.
International Law is either convention (observed by various states and agreed upon) or might flow from some decision of the UN (now there’s a democracy based on a percentage of tyrannies). It could be based on precedent in an internationally recognised court. Whatever it is, it is not immutable (like Sharia Law) and it is not universally agreed or endorsed, despite its high-flown name.as in Saddam in his underpants is an outrage and another huge nail in the coffin of human rights.
This is what drives me around the fricking bend:
o Saddam fills mass graves. He gasses villages to eliminate Kurds and drains swamps to eliminate the Marsh Arabs. Human rights groups make feeble noises in protest; when someone suggests removing Saddam, same groups scream in horror.
o Picture of Saddam in shorts—“nail in the coffin of human rights”.
Apparently the modern idea of “human rights” is not one applied in the mass, but only in the singular. And, most particularly, only when it can harm the United States and other free states.
Posted by Rob Crawford on 2005 05 23 at 07:38 AM • permalinkDidn’t Stalin say a single death is a tragedy yet a million deaths is a statistic?
The left are only following orders.
Posted by Aging Gamer on 2005 05 23 at 08:08 AM • permalinkDuring the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam was near the fighting when a death-commando squad came after him.
I recall back in the 1980’s how the Iraqis and the Iranians were waging war against each other with no end in sight. It was only when the US and the West insisted that they stop and work on a cease fire that the war abated.
While the war caused deaths, casualties, and damage beyond tolerance, it did seem to focus the Middle East’s attention inward. Maybe in hindsight we should have simply let the war go on. Maybe allow it to drag the Saudis and Syrians in.
Posted by wronwright on 2005 05 23 at 09:23 AM • permalinkThat does not excuse demolishing the edifice of international and humanitarian law to depose and humiliate him.
Yes, it does. When you humiliate someone in the Middle East, people don’t rush to his side, they rush to join the crowd mocking him less they be considered worthy of humiliation, too. That’s why bin Laden is reduced to making prank phone calls from the Hindu Kush.
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 05 23 at 09:42 AM • permalink“When you humiliate someone in the Middle East, people don’t rush to his side, they rush to join the crowd mocking him less they be considered worthy of humiliation, too.”
Thus does Richard McEnroe demonstrate that he has infinitely more insight into Arab/Muslim culture than all of the so-called multiculturists in academia and the MSM.
“Multicultural” means “I assume you’re just like a Volvo-driving East Coast latte-sipping NPR listener, but you also make really cool rugs.”
There is no such thing as international law.
Posted by James Waterton on 2005 05 23 at 12:46 PM • permalinkSadaam Hussein use to litter the entire country with pictures of himself, in every pose imaginable, from the frightening to the risable. Why should he complain now that he picture is still everywhere?
Posted by Protagonist on 2005 05 24 at 07:08 AM • permalink
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