Joseph P. Phillips: Beheadings in Iraq

NPR : The Tavis Smiley Show for Tuesday, July 6, 2004

A commentator on the Tavis Smiley show today drew what I thought was an apt analogy between the Islamic extremists and Jihadists killing Americans and Iraqis in Iraq, and the white supremacist thugs of the early 20th century (the Klan and related sorts). He talked about todays practice of beheading as a tactic to initimidate and terrify for political purposes, and compared it to the practice of lynching black people in the early 1900s. Like the white supremacists of that time, Jihadists, largely ignorant, motivated by hatred and with a poverty of vision, use these tactics to terrify their target population (Americans, or other Iraqis) hoping to stop the march of history and progress towards a better society. But just like America in the 1900s, those tactics did not stop thousands of ordinary citizens from moving forward towards a more just society. I don't think its going to stop the Iraqis either.