A burning issue with some folks

The SMH ran a story about an SBS program (for non-Aussies, that's a government owned tv station with a "world" view geared to serving the non-English speaking communities) that will air tonight showing "US soldiers in Afghanistan burnt the bodies of dead Taliban and taunted their opponents about the corpses...."

Boy has that brought the Yank Rambos out of their foxholes:
http://psychoticpatriot.blogspot.com/2005/10/psyops-burning-bodies-video-wtf.html
http://dreadpundit.blogspot.com/2005/10/centcom-responds-to-report-of-taliban.html
http://socalpundit.com/blog/index.php/2005/10/19/liberalism-ties-the-hands-of-soldiers-in-the-war-on-terror/
http://returnoftheconservatives.blogspot.com/2005/10/film-rolls-as-troops-burn-taliban.html

But it was not all seen that way:
http://geniusofinsanityworld.blogspot.com/2005/10/taliban-bodies-burned-by-us-soldiers.html
http://culturelifenewsbreaking.blogspot.com/2005/10/american-soldiers-burn-peasant-and.html

Update and response to comments

To my bloody amazement and amusement, after about 200 posts over the last 3 months, this particular post seems to have attracted so much attention, surpassing the most popular page title by miles. I usually spend a bit of time anticipating and then preparing a post, but this one came about almost accidentally, and completely off-handedly. I was doing my regular Technorati search of smh.com.au and kept noticing the Rambo-esq posts on that SBS/SMH story. I read the SMH daily, but missed the story in the paper, and probably wouldn’t have paid much attention had I seen it.

What struck me was, first, the number of US-based references to the story; most SMH readers/followers are Australian. Next, the “Rambo” ones all seemed to run with the same idea – that the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply to terrorists and therefore terrorists have no rights. Apart from the substance or relevance of that dubious legal proposition, and apart from the shear bloody-mindedness of the posts (one guy said “bring marshmallows”), I was impressed as to how uniform every one of them was and the utter rejection of any sense of concern about the behaviour of the Coalition troops. Did it differ that much from the barbaric hanging of the bodies of the US contractors on that Iraqi bridge? Yes, we can get a bit too precious about the way wars end up getting fought, but is there no sense of proportionality at all? Are no holds barred? Is it ok for us to become as deprived of civil constraint as we like?

I also want to note, and appreciate, the fairly worded comment that the film makers “had an agenda”. Of course they did. They may have been imbedded with an anti-war group, but that does not deny their report any more than the imbedded reports we rely on when watching CNN or Fox or BBC. It is the nature of imbedded reporting that the reports get tainted, but we try to look through that to the facts as best as they can be discerned notwithstanding the taint. (See, http://guambatstew.blogspot.com/2005/10/hyperbole.html)

Apart from that, I have no comment. I was only making an observation about the commentators on the story, not about the story. I did not watch the SBS report. Crikey, I don’t even recall having read the Herald article, but if I did it wasn’t until after I compiled the post. My interest was in the invective that flowed from the reporting and how such a non-event (as I saw it sitting here) had become such a hot topic of interest and incendiary all the way acrosst the Pacific, and the hit-response to the post just underscores that.

It shows just how bitterly the terrorists have managed to divide us.