trying to grok

OUTRAGE

I woke up too late today.

This week I've been absolutely exhausted, and when the alarm went off at 06bloggingtime, I shut it off and went back to bed until 0730. And then I found all these things I wanted to write about.

First of all, I expressed outrage last week at the events at Abu Ghraib prison. However, a lot of that outrage has subsided by now, and I'm left being angry at the rest of the world. My feelings were mirrored today on LGF, when Charles Johnson responded to the following paragraph:

Bush spoke as his administration sought to counter a worldwide wave of revulsion over photographs showing Iraqi prisoners, some of them hooded, naked and in sexually humiliating poses, in an American-run prison in the Baghdad area.

Remember that “worldwide wave of revulsion” when a pregnant Israeli mother and her four daughters were murdered in cold blood by Arabs who videotaped the atrocity? Remember the “worldwide wave of revulsion” when four security contractors helping to rebuild Iraq were burned alive, ripped apart, and hung from a bridge by Arabs in Fallujah? Remember the “worldwide wave of revulsion” when an Italian hostage was murdered by Arabs on video?

You don’t?

Yes, I'm still disgusted at the soldiers who abused their position of power in the prison. But I'm getting more disgusted at the way the news can't stop talking about this story, as if none of the other atrocities in the world matter when ten Americans do something stupid. Der Speigel ran this magazine cover and called Americans "The Torturers of Baghdad"; did they run a cover of these photos under the headline "The Torturers of Fallujah"? That's what I thought. See, I was under the impression that Uday was the torturer of Baghdad, but apparently that's not newsworthy. That's like sooo 2003, Sarah.

Posted by Sarah at May 7, 2004 10:56 AM