RUTHFULLY YOURS

The liberal narrative is that fighting back against Muslim terrorists just makes them attack us. It’s best to just throw up our hands.

The Senate Torture report was supposed to prove their point by inciting Muslim violence. But no particularly special violence has arrived.

A desperate CBS based its entire claim of Muslim outrage on one guy from Twitter who wasn’t even outraged by it. It’s a sad state of affairs when CBS can’t even find an angry Muslim.

At the Daily Beast, Dean Obeidallah tries to explain why Muslims aren’t outraged.

There are two reasons why the torture report has resulted in nothing more—to date—than a few public condemnations and a slew of snarky tweets by ISIS supporters using the hashtag…

First, people across the Middle East have seen their own governments employ horrible forms of torture for years. It’s one of the oppressive techniques utilized by their respective leaders to remain in power…

The second, and what I see as the bigger reason for a collective shrug from the Muslim world, was what we didn’t see in the report. There were no allegations that the jailers engaged in desecrating Islam.

The common denominator in the most violent protests against Western actions has been when Islam had been insulted.

Dean’s various excuses and attacks on America and Israel aside, his two reasons are correct. What he doesn’t say is that…

1. Nothing at Gitmo even qualified as torture by Muslim standards. Torture is sadistic. Gitmo was about interrogation. It was pragmatic. Its goal was to achieve information. Actual torture in the Muslim world is actually about torture. Information is secondary.

Here’s the type of thing that Saddam’s men did.

An Iraqi soldier, who according to the facility’s records witnessed the beatings, said interrogators regularly used pliers to remove men’s teeth, electric prods to shock men’s genitals and drills to cut holes in their ankles.

In one instance, the soldier recalled, he witnessed a Kuwaiti soldier, who had been captured during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, being forced to sit on a broken Pepsi bottle. The man was removed from the bottle only after it filled up with his blood, the soldier said. He said the man later died.

“I have seen interrogators break the heads of men with baseball bats, pour salt into wounds and rape wives in front of their husbands,” said former Iraqi soldier Ali Iyad Kareen, 41.

The Dems may be putting on their phony outrage, but no one in the Muslim world can even bother to fake outrage at what amounts to high pressure interrogation rather than torture. The only thing we did that Muslims have been interested in is waterboarding and they have little enthusiasm for it because it lacks the sort of brutality and obvious infliction of bodily harm that they like.

Finally, Muslims assume that the report is a whitewash and that we were probably doing the sorts of things to them that they were doing to us.

2. Human life is cheap. Islam is what matters.

Islam is a collectivist ideology. Insulting it insults the honor of all Muslims. Waterboarding one Muslim however is a matter for his family honor. Muslims can fake outrage at it if need be, but they don’t really care. It doesn’t strike at their identity or sense of worth more so than the existence of Muslim captives in non-Muslim hands already does.

So next time Senate Dems need to fake a Koran desecration if they want Muslim outrage.