Waterboarding, Sarah Palin and the West's Image Abroad as the 'Great Satan'

[applegrove]

Waterboarding, Sarah Palin and the West's Image Abroad as the 'Great Satan'

by Anne Speckhard at the Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anne-speckhard/waterboarding-sarah-palin_b_5235751.html?utm_hp_ref=politics

"SNIP......................


"Waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists," Sarah Palin told an audience at the National Rifle Association's Stand and Fight rally last weekend. She would reinstitute the practice, she told listeners, calling it a valuable technique.

What Sarah Palin perhaps doesn't know is that when al Qaeda was being formed, the middle eastern extremists who were using terrorism to fight their own corrupt governments had finally given up fighting inside their own governments in the face of overwhelming force. Realizing that they couldn't stop their own governments, they began to look for who was on the outside -- funding and propping up torturous and unjust regimes. And that led them to begin to question foreign policies carried out by the U.S. and the EU. Ideologically it led to the budding AQ terrorists labeling the West as the "Great Satan" and to their new initiatives of attacking us. They called that an attack on the "the head of the snake."

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Images and stories about torture and acts that cross the bounds of human decency can easily be used to push fence-sitters into the enemy's camp ideologically, and also to then move them along the terrorist trajectory into finally enacting terrorism.

While Sarah Palin may consider herself a patriot, all we need are more Americans publicly espousing waterboarding, and other unacceptable terror methods, to push even more potential enemies into believing that indeed the West is serving, or is itself, the Great Satan.



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[applegrove]

1. And what does a baptism of waterboarding say about the god Sarah Palin says she follows.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

2. Obviously it's a very vengeful God

Suffice it to say, if I were a Christian, I wouldn't recognize he/she/it. The fact that these comments are actually driving some previous Christian supporters away is pretty damning in regards to just how awful her remarks are.

[applegrove]

3. Yes, of course. But what I meant was

what does it say about the Christian god to muslims in the middle east? She can‘t unring that bell. Not that I think she would ever admit it was wrong to say that in the first place.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

4. Well, we can be sure that she will not be responsible for anything bad that happens

to Americans working and/or traveling through the ME as a result of her ill comments. It's almost as though she's trying to incite more terrorist act. I guess that since PBO has decimated Al-Queda and killed OBL, we're in need of new enemies in the ME?