Letter to the Editor at The Independent (UK), Responding to Robert Fisk’s "To understand the Islamist beheading of a French priest ...."

The Independent (London)

Letter to the Editor

letters@independent.co.uk

Re:   Responding to Robert Fisk’s To understand the Islamist beheading of a French priest, we must remember what happened 20 years earlier (July 27, 2016), http://tinyurl.com/hzeuljs                                  

Robert Fisk wrote:

The Algerian civil war—between a brutal Islamist army and the equally savage Algerian army which had fatally cancelled elections which Islamists would have won in 1992—had by 1996 already reached Syrian proportions .... It was inevitable that the killers from the GIA, the Islamic Armed Group, would turn upon all foreigners—and that also meant priests and bishops. (emphasis added)

It is not “inevitable” in any civil war—no matter how brutal—that one side murder foreigners. Certainly, the GIA’s murdering foreigners—even during the brutal Algerian civil war—was not “inevitable”. It was a choice; it was the wrong choice. The people who carried out such atrocities were not lawful military combatants; they were criminals, pure and simple. The fact that Fisk argues otherwise is just another example how Western journalists lower the ethical bar when it comes to any crime perpetrated in the Third World—particularly when the crime is perpetrated by extremists in the name of Islam.

Seth Barrett Tillman

Seth Barrett Tillman, Submitted as a Letter to the Editor at The Independent (U.K.), Responding to Robert Fisk’s "To understand the Islamist beheading of a French priest ...." New Reform Club (July 31, 2016, 4:39 PM), <https://reformclub.blogspot.com/2016/07/letter-to-editor-responding-to-robert.html>; 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/SethBTillman (@SethBTillman) 

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