'Arab Street'

Reuters: U.S. Abuse of Iraqi Prisoners Inflame Arabs. (Via LGF)

"The liberators are worse than the dictators" ... "That really, really is the worst atrocity" ... Arab satellite televisions, seen by millions of Arabs and Muslims, began their news bulletins with the pictures, which they said showed the "savagery" of U.S. troops. ... "Americans are racists and cowards, that's what I understood from these pictures."

The article mentions the following only in passing:

The U.S. military has brought criminal charges against six soldiers relating to accusations of abuses from November and December 2003 on some 20 detainees, including indecent acts with another person, maltreatment, battery, dereliction of duty and aggravated assault.

After the Fallajah ambush and mutilations, or after the suicide bombings in Basra, or after the gunning down of four Israeli children and their pregnant mother, did anyone hear the 'Arab street' declare criminal charges should be -- much less would be -- brought against anybody?

UPDATE May 4: From Victor Davis Hanson: Abu Ghraib. (Via LGF)

The Arab world -- where the mass-murdering Osama bin Laden is often canonized -- is shocked by a pyramid of nude bodies and faux-electric prods, but has so far expressed less collective outrage in its media when the charred corpses of four Americans were poked and dismembered by cheering crowds in Fallujah. The taped murder of Daniel Pearl or a video of the hooded Italian who had his brains blown out -- this is the daily fare that emanates now from the television studios of the Middle East.

Indeed, if Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera could display the same umbrage over mass murder that they do over these recent accounts of shame and humiliation of the detained Iraqis, much of the gratuitous violence of the Middle East would surely diminish. The papers that now allege war crimes are the same state-controlled and censored media that print gleeful accounts of death and desecration of Westerners and promulgate an institutionalized anti-Semitism not seen since the Third Reich.

Posted by Forkum at May 3, 2004 09:56 AM