Letting Evil Off The Hook

Why can't our own media grasp the importance of what we're trying to achieve in Iraq? They averted their eyes from the murder of Nick Berg so that they could imagine that we are the real problem.

The horrific slaughter of Nick Berg should be compulsory viewing for those who seem to have forgotten who our real enemy is.

IT took a long, long time to saw off the head of Nick Berg, and for nearly a third of it you could hear the 26-year-old American screaming and gurgling.
I know that because I saw the video his five killers – Islamic terrorists – made of his murder.

It is God-awful to watch, and ends with one of these animals holding up as a trophy Berg's severed head, eyes staring in shock. The video was then rushed to an al-Qaida-linked website, which gleefully published it.

The ABC seemed annoyed to have had this interruption to its wall-to-prison-wall coverage of the "torture" of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers.

"Beheading deflects focus from Iraq prison scandal," sighed the headline of the ABC Online report.

Sorry, but shouldn't that have read: "Beheading puts Iraq prison 'scandal' in focus?" After all this hysteria over pictures of Iraqi prisoners being made to pose naked, there's nothing like a live-on-video decapitation to remind us what real evil looks like, and to make us ask if a media that forgot the difference helped to kill Nick Berg.

It was probably about the very time this video of Berg's murder was being sent to the al-Qaida site that I found myself in a heated argument on ABC TV's Insiders program.