Green Oasis

Photojournalist Zoriah recently witnessed a suicide bombing in Anbar province. “Several dozen people lost their lives … children, old men, civilians, police, and military men. The scene was horrific beyond words, even for someone like me who has a fairly high threshold for such things.” He managed to take a few graphic photographs before he was escorted away by U.S. marines.

After posting the photographs on his blog, he was told to remove them by public affairs officers of the U.S. military. When he refused, his embed with the marine unit was terminated.

As a commenter on reddit put it, “Funny how the folks who most support war never want to see it. Out of sight, out of mind.”

Update: Here’s another illustration of our complacency from Café Philos.

The Death of Yugoslavia is an excellent BBC documentary on the causes and course of the wars in the former republics of Yugoslavia. It is primarily told through extraordinary interviews with those in power. I am amazed that they got so many leaders to speak so candidly about the war. It reminds me that the power to do great evil is in the banal hands of democratically elected political leaders. (via kottke.org)

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6

Mark Bittman on what’s wrong with what we (i.e. Americans) eat.

I avoid posting all the police abuse stuff that I hear about if for no other reason than that there’s so much of it. The quantity threatens to make me blasé about the subject. This story (and others) makes me shake my head in disbelief.

Police tasered a 17-year-old boy who was in paramedics’ care because he had a seizure. When he woke up, he became disoriented and frightened due to a condition known as postictal psychosis. He struck a paramedic and the police attempted to restrain him by tasering him twelve times!

The police and paramedics lied in their reports stating that he had only been tasered twice despite ample physical evidence to the contrary.

The idea that the taser is nonlethal makes us too willing to use it. Tasering someone twelve times is excessive. It’s fortunate that this didn’t end in tragedy.

Sam Harris made a provocative comparison between the FLDS and Islam:

A point of comparison: The controversy of over Fitna was immediately followed by ubiquitous media coverage of a scandal involving the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). In Texas, police raided an FLDS compound and took hundreds of women and underage girls into custody to spare them the continued, sacramental predations of their menfolk. While mainstream Mormonism is now granted the deference accorded to all major religions in the United States, its fundamentalist branch, with its commitment to polygamy, spousal abuse, forced marriage, child brides (and, therefore, child rape) is often portrayed in the press as a depraved cult. But one could easily argue that Islam, considered both in the aggregate and in terms of its most negative instances, is far more despicable than fundamentalist Mormonism. The Muslim world can match the FLDS sin for sin–Muslims commonly practice polygamy, forced-marriage (often between underage girls and older men), and wife-beating–but add to these indiscretions the surpassing evils of honor killing, female “circumcision,” widespread support for terrorism, a pornographic fascination with videos showing the butchery of infidels and apostates, a vibrant form of anti-semitism that is explicitly genocidal in its aspirations, and an aptitude for producing children’s books and television programs which exalt suicide-bombing and depict Jews as “apes and pigs.”

Any honest comparison between these two faiths reveals a bizarre double standard in our treatment of religion. We can openly celebrate the marginalization of FLDS men and the rescue of their women and children. But, leaving aside the practical and political impossibility of doing so, could we even allow ourselves to contemplate liberating the women and children of traditional Islam?

Update: Jesus and Mo’ weigh in on the issue.