About the Outcry following the Death of a U.S, citizen

On Friday, 18th of June 2004 individuals attributed to the Al Queda network killed a US citizen: they beheaded him, recorded the deed with a video camera and put it on the web as a videoclip.

The U.S. establishment reacted with sudden rage, foremost amongst them crusader G.W. Bush Junior., who spoke of this 'ruthless deed which layed bare the true character of evil', and the war against terror would and must go on. Now, I don't want to here discuss Bush's intellectual capacities and his thoughts about the 'real character of evil' (whatever that may be) , I would much rather ask whence this outrage over the single mentioned case - in west Europe too - as misters Schroeder, Fischer und consorts expressed simultaneously digust, mourning and horror - and with what right do the elite work themselves up?!

None of those who expressed themselves before cameras and microphones had any link of any kind to the beheaded (his relatives excepted). Nonetheless they seemed very emotionally involved (whether they really were remains open), and spoke of a 'senseless and innocent sacrifice'.

If we were to believe the reports about the killed U.S. citizen, he attended U.S. military helicopters for years - he didn't seem to have been so 'innocent', rather one or two things tend to indicate his inclusion among active war participants, even were he not formally a soldier, for without maintenance personel no war helicopter would stay long in service. Nearly daily news reaches us from the near East that once more the Coalition Forces under the leadership of the USA have killed civilians, as they put it each time, merely 'inadvertently'. Wedding parties bombarded by military helicopters, bombarded refugee convoys, (a speciality of the US, too, when we think of Kosovo 1999, not to mention the people shot every day).

The distance from these war casualties must be just as great as that from the above mentioned American, but no politician, outside a very few exceptions, protests even half so engagedly about their deaths. And in consequence there is much to say that the outcry is purely and simply a performance for the public; with the aim of, on one side, agitating, and on the other, dedicating them to the further waging of the war in [and to my mind, against] the near East, thus keeping protests to a minimum.

Had the man been Iraqi, had he been shot by a US soldier, where would the international outcry have been? The power of pictures is enormous; on the other hand what was done to the US american is in no way, as Bush claimed, 'barbaric', for the highest representative of a state of which every year dozens of people take their place on electric chairs, which fatally injects them with death cocktails or yet hangs them, and who moreover signed countless execution orders as Governer of Texas, has lost any moral legitimacy to make such judgements. The beheading may appear bloodier than the clinically sterile injection-to-death in a tiled room (the execution officials in the USA don't neglect to disinfect the elbow of the death candidate before the introduction of the needle through which the death cocktail will be injected), that alters death not a bit.

I sit here in a cell and have considered why the execution of the service engineer does not outrage me or shock me in the least. I doubt that I would be especially desensitised, for the daily news about the killing of Iraqi women, children and men affects me deeply, as well as the inhumane torture by the US military. The dead Iraqi woman, the dead Iraqi man, the dead children, they had no choice - he who kept combat helicopters flightworthy had a choice! He didn't need to dedicate himself to this career!