The man, the legend.
Posted on 10/11/2004 1:27:50 PM PDT by Snake65
THE QUALITY OF MERSEY
Today, for the first time in all my years with the Telegraph Group, I had a column pulled. The editor expressed concerns about certain passages and we were unable to reach agreement, so on this Tuesday something else will be in my space.
I’d written about Kenneth Bigley, seized with two American colleagues but unlike them not beheaded immediately. Instead, sensing that they could exploit potential differences within "the coalition of the willing", for three weeks the Islamists played a cat-and-mouse game with Mr Bigley's life, in which Fleet Street, the British public, governments in London and Dublin and Islamic lobby groups in the United Kingdom were far too willing to participate. As I always say, in this war the point is not whether you’re sad about the dead people, but what you’re prepared to do about it. What "Britain" – from Ken Bigley’s brother to the Foreign Secretary – did was make it more likely that other infidels will meet his fate.
I suppose the Telegraph felt the column was a little heartless. Well, this is a war, and misplaced mawkishness will only lead to more deaths. In The Face Of The Tiger, I wrote as follows about the first anniversary of 9/11, when coverage was threatening to go the way of Princess Di and mounds of teddy bears:
3,000 people died on September 11th, leaving a gaping hole in the lives of their children, parents, siblings and friends. Those of us who don't fall into those categories are not bereaved and, by pretending to be, we diminish the real pain of those who really feel it. That's not to say that, like many, I wasn't struck by this or that name that drifted up out of the great roll-call of the dead. Newsweek's Anna Quindlen "fastened on", as she put it, one family on the flight manifest:Peter Hanson, Massachusetts
Susan Hanson, Massachusetts
Christine Hanson, 2, Massachusetts
As Miss Quindlen described them, "the father, the mother, the two-year old girl off on an adventure, sitting safe between them, taking flight." Christine Hanson will never be three, and I feel sad about that. But I did not know her, love her, cherish her; I do not feel her loss, her absence in my life. I have no reason to hold hands in a "healing circle" for her. All I can do for Christine Hanson is insist that the terrorist movement which killed her is hunted down and prevented from targeting any more two-year olds. We honour Christine Hanson's memory by righting the great wrong done to her, not by ersatz grief-mongering.
That’s the way I feel about Kenneth Bigley. Here’s the column the Telegraph declined to publish:
Whether or not it is, in the technical sense, a "joke", I find myself, with the benefit of hindsight, in agreement with Billy Connolly’s now famous observation on Kenneth Bigley – "Aren’t you the same as me, don’t you wish they would just get on with it?"
Had his killers "just got on with it", they would have decapitated Mr Bigley as swiftly as they did his two American confreres. But, sensing that there was political advantage to be gained in distinguishing the British subject from his fellow hostages, they didn’t get on with it, and the intervening weeks reflected poorly on both Britain and Mr Bigley.
None of us can know for certain how we would behave in his circumstances, and very few of us will ever face them. But, if I had to choose the very last last words I’d want to find myself uttering in this life, "Tony Blair has not done enough for me" would be high up on the list. First, because it’s the all but official slogan of modern Britain, the dull rote whine of the churlish citizen invited to opine on waiting lists or public transport, and thus unworthy of the uniquely grisly situation in which Mr Bigley found himself. And, secondly, because those words are so at odds with the spirit of a life spent, for the most part, far from these islands. Ken Bigley seems to have found contemporary Britain a dreary, insufficient place and I doubt he cared about who was Prime Minister from one decade to the next. Had things gone differently and had his fate befallen some other expatriate, and had he chanced upon a month-old London newspaper in his favourite karaoke bar up near the Thai-Cambodian border and read of the entire city of Liverpool going into a week of Dianysian emotional masturbation over some deceased prodigal son with no inclination to return whom none of the massed ranks of weeping Scousers from the Lord Mayor down had ever known, Mr Bigley would surely have thanked his lucky stars that he and his Thai bride were about as far from his native sod as it’s possible to get.
While Ken Bigley passed much of his life as a happy expat, his brother Paul appears to have gone a stage further and all but seceded. Night and day, he was on TV explaining to the world how the Bigley family’s Middle East policy is wholly different from Her Majesty’s Government – a Unilateral Declaration of Independence accepted de facto by Mr Blair’s ministry when it dispatched Jack Straw to Merseyside to present formally his condolences to the Bigleys, surely the most extraordinary flying visit ever undertaken by a British Foreign Secretary. For their pains, the government was informed by Paul Bigley that the Prime Minister had "blood on his hands". This seems an especially stupid and contemptible formulation when anyone with an Internet connection can see Ken Bigley’s blood and the hand it’s literally on holding up his head.
It reminded me of Robert Novak of The Chicago Sun-Times back in May, quoting "one senior official of a coalition partner" calling for the firing of Donald Rumsfeld on the grounds that "there must be a neck cut, and there is only one neck of choice."
At pretty much that exact moment in Iraq, Nick Berg's captors were cutting his head off - or, rather, feverishly hacking it off while raving "God is great!" The difference between the participants in this war is that on one side robust formulations about "blood on his hands" and "calls for the Defence Secretary’s head" are clichéd metaphors, and on the other they mean it.
Paul Bigley can be forgiven his clumsiness: he's a freelancer winging it. But the feelers put out by the Foreign Office to Ken Bigley's captors are more disturbing: by definition, they confer respectability on the head-hackers and increase the likelihood that Britons and other infidels will be seized and decapitated in the future. The United Kingdom, like the government of the Philippines when it allegedly paid a ransom for the release of its Iraqi hostages, is thus assisting in the mainstreaming of jihad.
By contrast with the Fleet Street-Scouser-Whitehall fiasco of the last three weeks, consider Fabrizio Quattrocchi, murdered in Iraq on April 14th. In the moment before his death, he yanked off his hood and cried defiantly, "I will show you how an Italian dies!" He ruined the movie for his killers. As a snuff video and recruitment tool, it was all but useless, so much so that the Arabic TV stations declined to show it.
If the FCO wants to issue advice in this area, that's the way to go: If you're kidnapped, accept you're unlikely to survive, say "I’ll show you how an Englishman dies", and wreck the video. If they want you to confess you're a spy, make a little mischief: there are jihadi from Britain, Italy, France, Canada and other western nations all over Iraq – so say yes, you're an MI6 agent, and so are those Muslims from Tipton and Luton who recently joined the al-Qaeda cells in Samarra and Ramadi. As Churchill recommended in a less timorous Britain: You can always take one with you. If Mr Blair and other government officials were to make that plain, it would be, to use Mr Bigley’s word, "enough". A war cannot be subordinate to the fate of any individual caught up in it.
And, if you don’t want to wind up in that situation, you need to pack heat and be prepared to resist at the point of abduction. I didn’t give much thought to decapitation when I was mooching round the Sunni Triangle last year, but my one rule was that I was determined not to get into a car with any of the locals and I was willing to shoot anyone who tried to force me. If you’re not, you shouldn't be there.
None of the above would have guaranteed Mr Bigley's life, but it would have given him, as it did Signor Quattrocchi, a less pitiful death, and it would have spared the world a glimpse of the feeble and unserious Britain of the last few weeks. The jihadists have become rather adept at devising tests customized for each group of infidels: Madrid got bombed, and the Spaniards failed their test three days later; the Australian Embassy in Jakarta got bombed, but the Aussies held firm and re-elected John Howard’s government anyway. With Britain, the Islamists will have drawn many useful lessons from the decadence and defeatism on display.
STEYN ONLINE, October 11th 2004
Well done.
Mr. Steyn will always find a standing invitation for dinner at my house. Expect some chit-chat.. :)
Steyn deserves a Pulitzer for that marvelous word alone
Thanks God for this man.
Mark Steyn, please divorce your wife and marry me. I will wait.
(What do you look like, BTW?)
Steyn uses hard words to point up a hard lesson namely that the only way to deal with the islamofascist savages is to fight them. The only other choice is submission. There is no third way.
The man, the legend.
Romulus would be proud. Indeed, Quattrocchi was a man.
BTTT
He looks a lot like al Sadr, actually.
The header at Steyn Online has a rather blurry black-and-white image of him.
As I wrote in part in another post:
"I was in the UK for a spell until recently and this matter was, understandably, all over the papers. And who was getting the blame? Tony Blair. If you think our media is one-sided, you ain’t seen nothing. The headlines blare (pun intended) statements as fact that turn out to be the incoherent utterances of some obscure professor from some place like the Secondary College of Ridley-on-the-Pee who after consuming seventeen pints in the Cock and Bull Pub adjacent to the left border of the campus was heard to mumble something that sounded much like an indictment of the Prime Minister. And, if I could find anything funny in all of this, I would have to laugh at the press who are all over the Tories because they – heaven forfend – supported the war and won’t flip-flop for political advantage. Yes. That’s the criticism of the Conservative Party on Iraq. They’re sticking to their previous position and refuse to pander to what the press wants to hear.
While I assume (and hope) that somewhere in the UK press there was some venom directed at the subhuman pigs (yes I use the word intentionally) who are actually doing these things, I didn't see it..."
Now I know why I didn't see it.
"We must all hang together or surely we will all hang seperately."
-Ben Franklin
It's time for the Brits, and us, to close ranks and stop bawling.
A little young for me, but very good-looking.
(sigh).....
Remember Colonel Mascardo in the Spanish Civil War. Mascardo held the Alcazar for Franco. Republican forces kidnapped Moscardo's 16 year old son, Luis. Luis' captors called Moscardo on the telephone to inform him that unless he surrendered the Alcazar, Luis would be shot. Moscardo asked to speak to his son. He then told Luis, "Commend your soul to God, shout 'Viva Espana' and die like a hero." Luis was immediately shot.
The Sun Newspaper in England will usually run stuff that the other paper won't. They've had some really hard hitting articles about terrorists. You might want to check out their site: http://www.thesun.co.uk/section/0,,2,00.html
Charitably I salute Canada. (Duck, darn you duck). It was Sir Henry Newbolt who composed his poem. He Fell Among Thieves. I do not know how to set it up. It is of an Englishman in a far off clime. He is told he is to die, for the deaths of his kidnappers ....." He laughed:If one may settle the score for five . I am ready....." Later he meets his death with courage. All respects to the dead man of course. Sadly, Hitler would have won if.....
He ought to address this column to John Effin Kerry
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