From Steyn online:
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.
You can read the pulled column here.
You’ll also note that Mark doesn’t whine that he’s being censored. Mark is a grown-up.
Seems there’s an uncomfortably large cross-section of the western world that doesn’t see this conflict as a war. 9/11 was just an unpleasant episode of random violence for them, apparently. So the grisly deaths of Bigley and the two American hostages (Eugene Armstrong & Jack Hensley) serve their purposes to show that we shouldn’t be ‘invading’ Iraq or removing the Taliban from power.
To remind people, as Steyn did, that this conflict is bigger than a dead British hostage; that this is a war is about freeing an entire region and tens or hundreds of millions of people from tyranny and bondage; removing the hindrances that keep these people and nations from active participation in a free world… Somehow that doesn’t get through to certain folks.
So is it just partisan Bush/Blair hatred? Stupidity? A blind longing for 9/10? All of the above mixed into some socialist utopian fantasy? Hard to say. But Steyn was dead-on. If we value our way of life, we’ve got to fight for it. Radical Islam seeks the destruction of our way of life. Therefore we must seek the destruction of radical Islam. How much plainer need it be said for people to ‘get’ it?
What struck me was the irony of the thing: Steyn writes a bracing and clear-eyed column, sounding an alarm about how mawkishness and oversensitivity are making England a weaker combatant and a bigger target for terror, and the column gets rejected because it’s considered too insenstitive!
It’d be funny if it wasn’t sad.
You notice how Americans and Jews are not given the option of an appeal for their lives. The answer is already a given to the terrorists.
They were not so sure about England, however, and maybe neither was Mr. Bigley. I kept wishing Mr. Bigley would stop letting these terrorist use him to embarrass himself, his family and his country in his last days. I mean it wasn’t like he was 21 with a long life ahead. As it was, his family also turned out to embarrass also. It is one thing to plead for the life of your loved one. It is another to critize your countries leader as if they were the fault.
So, the terrorist got half of what they wanted, Bigly and his family all got less than nothing. Duh!
Does anyone know specifically what Mark was ask to modify? That would be even more interesting than the censor itself.
When will the DNC file a lawsuit alleging an illegal in-kind contribution to the Bush campaign?