Author: Zev Chafets
Publication: Daily News
Date: June 9, 2004
URL: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ideas_opinions/story/200953p-173455c.html
'Help me. I'm a Muslim."
Those, according to the Agence France
Press, were the last words Frank Gardner spoke before collapsing in the
street Sunday in Riyadh, the Saudi capital.
Gardner isn't a Muslim. But, as
an experienced Middle East hand, he knew the magic words. At least he thought
he did.
Gardner is the Middle Eastern correspondent
for the BBC who was out on a story when Saudi gunmen opened fire on him.
He took a hail of bullets, then begged for his life before lapsing into
a coma.
His cameraman, an Irishman named
Simon Cumbers, was killed instantly.
Gardner had a Koran with him, too
- part of his Islamic safety kit. He had a reason to imagine that posing
as a Muslim might save him. Just a week before, another group of Saudi
gunmen rampaged through a foreigners' housing compound in the eastern Saudi
city of Khobar.
First, they separated their hostages
by religion. Then, they freed the Muslims and murdered the infidels.
Maybe the Saudi shooters didn't
believe that Gardner was a Believer. Maybe they just didn't give a damn.
Either way, they left him in the street for dead and killed his cameraman.
The Saudi government is, as usual,
trying to sell the shootings as an aberration (Crown Prince Abdullah has
not yet blamed "Zionists" - as he did after the attack in Khobar - but
give him a few days). In fact, the attack on the BBC men was - like Al
Qaeda itself - simply the logical outgrowth of venerated Saudi traditions.
The Saudi royal family always has
practiced strict image control by judiciously doling out press visas to
"safe" correspondents. Al Qaeda's press policy is essentially no different.
The jihadis, too, want to impose censorship. Since Al Qaeda has no visas
to deny (and no expensive jewelry to bestow on compliant foreign correspondents),
it uses bullets and bombs to create its reporter-free zones - in Iraq as
well as Saudi Arabia.
Once the Western press is driven
away or confined to its hotels, Middle Eastern reality becomes what Al
Jazeera and other jihad-friendly Arab "news" organizations portray. That
picture will be calculated to further the strategic aim of the holy war:
the purification of the House of Islam by ridding it of infidels and their
influence.
Since the borders of Islam's house
range from Spain to Indonesia and Chechnya to Nigeria, this amounts to
a declaration of permanent war.
The Bush administration gets both
the indivisibility and the gravity of this threat to Western civilization
and international prosperity. The elites of Europe and their American useful
idiots still hope to cut a deal.
The BBC has been one of the most
eloquent and persistent voices for this brand of appeasement. Unhappily,
that didn't matter to the jihadis. Nuance is not their strong suit. To
them, Gardner and Cumbers were just a couple of foreigners in the service
of the enemy. The body of Simon Cumbers will be sent home for burial. Saudi
Arabia doesn't permit infidel funerals (Saudis have been known to dump
unclaimed corpses into the sea). Gardner may recover. I hope so.
But from Daniel Pearl's dying "I
am a Jew" to Gardner's pathetic "Help me, I'm a Muslim," the holy warriors
of Islam have made it plain: There are no magic words. The only good infidel
is a dead infidel.
