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About that “evil”…

Hearing that President Obama condemned the execution of Peter Kassig as “an act of pure evil” left me in quite a quandary.  While I certainly do not condone the killing of aid workers, I am still wondering who the President thinks he is, calling an execution “pure evil”?  Has he looked in the mirror lately?  What does he call it when we do it here?

First off, based on the American justice system in, say, Texas, Kassig would very likely have been quite thoroughly guilty of enough homicides while he was an Army Ranger in Iraq to get him executed legally if not for the fact that he was a soldier in the U. S. military when he was doing the killing.  Since murder has no statute of limitations, he would have been a dead man walking if it had been American citizens he had killed.  Looking at it from the other side of the coin, the Muslims would have the same case against him - he killed their people.  Execution is legal here, so why not?

So does using executions as terrorism make it so evil?  A lot of the arguments FOR capital punishment in the U. S. amount to creating fear - seems like the same concept the terrorists are using, doesn’t it?  By the normal logic of those who are for capital punishment, public beheading would be more effective in producing the desired effect - perhaps the “terrorists” are simply doing it right?

To top this all off, cleanly chopping someone’s head off is arguably more humane and quicker than filling the doomed up with drugs and leaving them to strangle in their own juices for twenty minutes, or burning them to a crisp with high voltage while they are still conscious.  The “humane” nature of a swift beheading was the stated reasoning behind the design of the Guillotine, made so famous by the French Revolution and Reign of Terror.

I tend to agree that the executions of prisoners like this is as bad as it gets.  My question is: if it is so evil for the Muslims to do it, why is it done here?  What is the difference?  Execution of a human being is execution, and it is wrong all the time, not just in the service of a foreign ideology - it is always evil.