FalcFans Forums

I find it a bit disconcerting that since the death of Al-Zarqawi last week, all images of this guy featured his dead grill. I know the guy was a terrorist, but is it too much to ask for the media to show a picture of what the guy looked like when he's alive?

Regardless of what they may have done in their lifetime, I think there is a certain amount of respect the dead deserve. And showing somebody's mangled and dead mug all over TV isn't it. But maybe that's just me.

They should have put his head on a pole and paraded it all over Iraq...he doesn't deserve any respect as he never showed any to the many innocent people he had killed. And i am considered a pacifist....lol

for someone like that, they should make billboards of his mangled body and post them all over every Muslim country that follows the "jihad" bs. they need to be reminded that we don't- and won't- take their sh!t...and if they want to bring it, the same results will happen.

Have to agree with the two previous posts. This guy, through his actions, deserves no respect in death, he gave none while alive. Head on pole sounds good to me. It worked well in the past.

do you honestly think parading his head will help our cause? it's just gonna enrage people who are already pissed off in general. why do that?

That's my point, although it seems that people want to make this a war of bullets, but this is really a war of a "hearts and minds".

All wars are Wars of "hearts and minds". People will be killing each other over baloney sandwiches or some 300 pounder who has dyed her hair blond for her "man". Violence is appreciated by mankind since we knocked off the first one...it hasn't changed a bit . The war in the Gulf area has been going on for over a thousand years and will continue to go on and thrive in the "jihad" enviornment...we haven't seen anything yet.

i hope this is not your rationale for condoning actions that propagate more violence.

I am reminded of an old John Wayne movie, The classic "The Searchers" .

In it, Wayne plays an irate rancher in search of the "indian" murderer/kidnapper of his brothers family. The scene I refer to is one in which Waynes' search party find the remains of a member if the raiding party. Wayne uses his side arm to shoot out the deceased eyes.

When vehemently questioned about this, as to "what good did that do?"

Wayne explains; "By waht you teach Parson, none, but by what that Buc belives, he can't enter heaven with out his eyes...has to wander between the winds forever."

This pretty much sums up my feeling about Al-Zarqawi, Sadam, Ben Laden, et al.


We, (US) didn't start this krap, but now that we are involved we should make the price for their actions high enough that they aren't willing to pay it. If that means digging latrines in their mosque, having Catholic, Christian, and Jewish clergy conduct their burials, or raze Mecca and build a McDonalds on the site, these people must be made to understand that this isn't the Mid-East and we really don't care if they want to worship whoever,but we will conduct international relations with whom ever and where ever this nation so chooses.

If Al-Zaraqwi's dead face shown in public disgraces him in any way then I support it.

War is inherently irrational. Violence can't be stopped in an enviorment such as Iraq or West L.A.....you just learn to deal with it. There is a reason the crime rate dropped 60% in New Orleans, and rose 50% in some cities where the evacuees wandered off to...

i sense your anger and i can appreciate it. if i were on a plane and some guy tried to hijack it i would be capable of killng him with my own hands and i'm not a violent person. but by publicily mutilating his body (though it could send a message of our resolve) it will also create 100's more enemies where there could have been 100's of allies. it doesnt seem worth it to me personaly, because we're not fighting arabs or muslims but terrorists. now if we were in an all out war with arabs and muslims that would be a completely different story.

i wasn't suggesting war is rational. in fact from my statement it can be seen that i think it is irrational. i was rebutting your statement essentially saying there is no rationale for condoning such actions. ironically enough, i believe it's your quote (all wars etc..)up there that affords the "rationale" for cutting off his head. if i'm wrong and you were not giving a rationale, reason, or excuse for cutting off zarqawi's head, i stand corrected.

I disagree. In past centuries, you defeated a country and you just dominated them with your military might. You didn't have to worry about winning their hearts and minds as long as you had the threat of military force to back it up. Right now, our threat of military force is rather meager since we have been stretched extremely thin the past 3 years.

And my beef is not with the U.S.'s foreign policy for this thread, as it seems to be steering that way. My beef is with the national media essentially parading this person's head on a stick. As we saw with the Muhammad cartoon, the media can have a major impact on a nation's foreign policy. I just think our national media would be more sensitive than flashing a giant graphic of somebody's giant dead head all over the TV.

Of course Pudge i was talking about "present day" wars...it is rather obvious that past wars were a different breed all together.But then again if you must, how far back do you want to go??? the Nazis came to power ONLY after winning the hearts and minds of the german people. WWI was basically started over an assassination of a world leader after a period of instability over the hearts and minds of the Austria-Hungary alliance and it's domination of the Yugoslavian sector.Vietnam wasn't a declared war, but during it's time it was nothing more than a political battle for the heart's and minds of the American people and the false war on communism.We could even say the American Civil war was a long battle over the "heart's and Minds" of the political climate surrounding the question of slavery.

As far as "media insensitivity" goes...that is a pipe dream. The media has always been about sensationalism, that is never going to change. The fact is that "the giant head" you described used the media to make a point every time he chopped a head off in a video.....there is no further comment except to say if you live by the sword, then you must also die by the sword.....and oh yeah......life is a bitch when you are on the run.

What I meant about past wars was that you could achieve your objectives (i.e. winning the war) without worrying about hearts and minds. Did the Americans care about winning the hearts and minds of the German and Japanese people when they fire bombed their cities and dropped nukes on them? No, they deliberately targetted and killed the civilian population in order to end the war quicker. That's my point, in the past you could march into a country, crush their military and you could essentially occupy their territory because people were either too scared, too poor, or just too uneffected by a foreign occupational force. Now, I'm not sure if that era of warfare is truly dead, but it's pretty clear this is not a war from that era. I'm sure if the U.S. decided to invade Botswana, they wouldn't nearly face the same issues with the local populace that they would face in any country that has a very loud voice of anti-U.S. and anti-West like many of the countries are in the Middle East.

This is not an "eye for an eye" territory we're talking about. By that statement, why didn't the media show images of Jeffrey Dahmer's mutilated and sodomized corpse after he died?

I'm just wondering why is it okay and acceptable to show this guy's dead head/body on television, when it's unacceptable to show others? I don't have a problem with the military's clearly PR-related press conference in order to confirm his death. But I do have issue with 3 and 4 days later when the major media outlets are running follow-up stories about him, cue Giant Dead Head graphic, just as an overt reminder to the viewers that unless they've lived under a rock the past 3-4 days, this dude is dead.

This just seems to be an "us vs. them" issue. And that to me is the wrong message to send. A war on terrorism is essentially a war on fundamentalism. You don't eradicate fundemantalism by blindly killing your enemies, that only feeds fundamentalism. You have to reach the hearts and minds of the non-fundamentalist people and make them see that fundamentalism is just as much a danger to them as it is to us. Having our media portray this "us vs. them" mentality is sending the wrong message and just feeding into it.

And your pessimism is mildly disconcerting. We should just live with problems rather than try to fix them.