The Murder of Nick Berg
Commentary by Steve Yuhas
May 14, 2004

Pictures of Iraqis who have American blood on their hands being humiliated at the hands of their American guards all seem trivial now don’t they? 

After the release of the murderous hacking off of the head of 26-year-old Nick Berg of Pennsylvania I sit in amazement as people on the left and Democrats continue the barrage of criticism against the President and the troops in Iraq.

Berg was a civilian who went to Iraq on his own in order to help the people of Iraq build for themselves a free and peaceful country.  He wasn’t a member of the military nor was he a contractor hired by anyone, he was simply an American who believed in the mission and went to Iraq to help. 

He was kidnapped by members of Al Qaeda (who Democrats still say have no connection to Iraq before the war) and sat before a camera in an orange prison jumpsuit forced to introduce himself and give a family tree.  Shortly after reading a rambling statement about Allah one of the masked men, who the group claims to be Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (Osama bin Laden’s man in Baghdad both before the war and after) took out a long knife and began the egregious task of beheading the young Jewish American.

A statement released by the group echoes the criticism and becomes the self-fulfilling prophecy that has headlined the mainstream media for the last week.  Senator Kennedy (D-MA) took to the floor of the United States Senate following the release of humiliating pictures of Iraqi detainees declaring that Saddam’s torture chambers were re-opened by George Bush and under American management. 

Many on the left, mainstream Democrats (including the presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry) and sadly some Republicans made similar comments and commentators said that it would only be a matter of time before terrorists killed an American and used the prison photos as motive.

Nowhere in the zeal to paint American forces as evil torturers did the media help provide a perspective necessary to adequately consider the pictures that were taken at Abu Ghraib.  It didn’t matter that only a dozen or so of the 150,000 troops in Iraq were involved in the improper conduct – the left had the pictures they needed to damage the mission in Iraq, the President.

Then came the video of an American being viciously murdered at the hands of Islamic terrorists.

All the words that were used to describe the humiliation of Iraqis were being used again to describe the brutal murder of an American.  Torture, abhorrent, inhumane and indescribable were adjectives used by some on the left and in the media interchangeably to describe the two sets of pictures.  The problem now is that we’ve elevated fraternity pranks and obscenity to torture and now lack any words to accurately describe what happened to Nick Berg.

As I watched the video of the 2^nd Jewish American to be beheaded by Islamic extremists I became sick to my stomach and was brought to tears.  I didn’t know Berg and I knew that the video contained his death, but to see a man thrown to the floor with his hands tied and to listen to his screams as he was murdered by five men invoking Allah was more than I could bear. 

Torture and atrocity accurately describe what happened to Nick Berg, it doesn’t come close to describing what happened to a few Iraqis who shouldn’t have been forced to be naked, but who were able to walk away from the prison and whose captors are being brought to justice by court martial.

As the media works hard to make some moral equivalency between the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of a few soldiers to the beheading of an American the rest of us can see the distinction between the two.  The treatment of Iraqi prisoners never stopped a radical Islamist from killing Americans before and it was not the impetus now.  They killed 3,000 of us on September 11^th and hundreds more in the decade before; to say now that the death of Nick Berg is the result of a few soldiers acting out of anger or whatever their excuse is to deny that Muslim terrorists have been after us for decades.

The enemy we face in the world has made itself known in Iraq.  The five masked men who sadistically murdered an American represent the tens or hundreds of thousands who want to do us harm in the Middle East or right here at home.  The man with the knife could have been any of the September 11^th hijackers who lived among us.  Sadly, Nick Berg could have been any of us as well.

It is clear now as we juxtapose the pictures of Iraqi mistreatment at Abu Ghraib next to the video and images of Nick Berg that any attempt by the left or Democrats to paint American soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines with the same or similar brush as the Islamic killers is stretch of momentous proportion.  We are not like them, even at our worst at Abu Ghraib, and the comparison is offensive and repulsive.

The murder of Nick Berg was intended to make Americans demand the removal of our forces from Iraq and to halt the war against terrorism.  Little do the Islamic terrorists know that when one of our own is murdered in the name of their God that the American people rally around our President, our flag and our ideals of freedom and liberty.

America is not Spain and the lessons learned from the past by terrorists should be the waking of a sleeping giant that we were in World War II instead of the pacifist reaction that the people of Spain had after the killing of 200 of their people in March.

The five masked Muslims who killed Nick Berg may have been the needed awakening after we’ve hit the snooze bar of normalcy so long after 9-11.