Death By Chichi

I can't help but wonder where armchair warriors such as Mark Steyn bulk-purchase their off-the-rack bravery. Ordinarily you'd just attribute such drunken bravado to liquid courage, but Steyn has always trucked this stuff in with a tractor-trailer. Danger is his middle name, unless it's actually Percy.

But Steyn bristles with contempt at the two Fox journalists who, kidnapped and threatened with their lives in the Gaza Strip, were able to achieve release with what one assumes were rote gunpoint conversions to Islam.

In the Muslim world, they watch the Centanni/Wiig video and see men so in love with the present, the now, that they will do or say anything to live in the moment. And they draw their own conclusions -- that these men are easier to force into the car than that 16-year-old girl in Sydney was. It doesn't matter how "understandable" Centanni and Wiig's actions are to us, what the target audience understands is quite different: that there is nothing we're willing to die for. And, to the Islamist mind, a society with nothing to die for is already dead.

Yes, we're all on board with the "if people don't believe in something, they'll believe anything" cliché to a certain extent, and Steyn is probably correct in his assertion of what that video will mean to a jihadist. But it's not as if they don't find any number of other things to hate us for, and Steyn's only alternative for Centanni and Wiig is apparently his thoughtless imputation -- via Arthur Conan Doyle, no less -- that they should have just martyred themselves rather than pretend to convert. That was the choice they were given -- death or conversion. Period. No walkbacks, no changing your mind or second thoughts, you've literally got a gun at your head and this is the choice you're offered.

Who knows? Perhaps Steyn really would, were he to place himself in danger (remember, it is his middle name), refuse even the pretense of conversion and allow himself to be killed. After all, he sees himself as manning the rhetorical battlements of 1683 Vienna, defending Western glory from the Ottoman barbarians with his mighty oratorical flourishes. Every event is another Walter Mitty die-with-your-boots-on opportunity for a man who may as well not ever make it out of his slipper socks.

As Glenn Greenwald points out, there are plenty of Republican congressmen who are more than happy to find other ways to carve up the Constitution in the throes of hysteria. There is more than one brand of cowardice.

HUB
Are you people insane --?

DEVEREAUX
The time has come for one man to
suffer in order to save the lives of
hundreds.

HUB
How about two men? How about three?
How about public executions, that
might work.

DEVEREAUX
You're welcome to wait outside.

HUB
General... you've lost men, I've
lost men... but what you're doing...
It doesn't work in Belfast. It doesn't
work in Gaza. And it won't work here.

What if... they don't want their
leader back at all? You said yourself,
we don't even have him. Maybe what
they really want -- is that we herd
our children into stadiums. Put
soldiers into our streets. Radicalize
people who want to think of themselves
as Americans. Bend the law, shred
the constitution.

Because if we torture him -- and
let's call it what it is... You...
and I... then the country men like
us have sworn to defend. And bled to
defend. And died to defend... is
gone.

And they've won.

Gen. Devereaux stares hard at Hub. And then:

DEVEREAUX
(to Col. Hardwick)
I think we have to soundproof the
room before we begin.

-- The Siege, 1998.

Some of us have already decided that we prefer dying on our feet, if need be, than living on our knees. People like Steyn, who have no real skin in the game but are still very proud of their camo kneepads, are still thinking this is all just a big game of Risk. And other peoples' lives depend on a roll of the dice.