At the time, eye witness reports suggested she had been shot but evidence subsequently recovered reveals the grotesque reality of her murder.
Hala Jaber writes:
The voice of one of the Arab world's most highly regarded and outspoken journalists has been silenced. She was 30.
As a friend of Bahjat who had worked with her on a variety of tough assignments, I found it hard enough to bear the news of her murder. When I saw it replayed, it was as if part of me had died with her. How much more gruelling it must have been for a close family friend who watched the film this weekend and cried when he heard her voice.
Opponents of the war who delight in the charnal house that is modern day Iraq and, quietly among friends, derive some satisfaction in the mayhem, should reflect on this killing. But so too should the war's cheerleaders.
It is simply not good enough to take the Euston Manifesto's "war was right, peace was wrong" approach. It denies the inevitability of the one following on from the other - it is, to twist a term used often enough by the self-styled "hard" left, to divorce "right" from "responsibility". Bahja symbolised everything good they must have hoped would come of their war, launched on a wave of ideological wishful-thinking. Her dreadful end says much about its grim reality.
The film Fateless, based on an autobiography of the same name, tells the story of a 14 year old Hungarian Jew sucked up by the Holocaust. Throughout the film, Gyorgy rejects the notion - repeated by fellow Jews - of a shared Jewish "fate" of suffering. When he returns home, someone says to him, thinking to sympathise, 'it must have been the seventh circle of Hell.' 'Hell,' he replies, 'doesn't exist. The camps do.'
Myths drive our culture, but whether conjuring up Heaven or Hell we should be wary of confusing them with the real world.
3 comments:
Opponents of the war who delight in the carnal house that is modern day Iraq...
Who are these people? Do they really exist??
Myths drive our culture, but whether conjuring up Heaven or Hell we should be wary of confusing them with the real world.
Please, be very wary of confusing the myth of the slaughter-happy pacifists with the real world.
You're telling me Galloway et al do not delight at the destruction happening in Iraq? And since when have opponents to the war been pacifists? I'm not.
I'm sure Galloway et al are all wearing big "told you so" grins, but to say they are "delighted" at the destruction is taking it too far. I can't imagine anyone, other than the perpetrators, would be delighted at the destruction.
All pacifists: certainly not. But I am, and I resent being stereotyped as a cheerleader for slaughterhouse Iraq.
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