Can you believe it? Its insupportable! “Coarse men accustomed to off color banter” bury “refined” suicide bombers with “calm and prideful” bearing in an “irreverent” manner by covering them with rocks and dirt, reports an indignant Barry Beark on the front page of the NYT.

Why would Afghanis do such a thing?

Because Bearak reports Kabul is a weird place: “In Kabul, the burial of a suicide bomber occurs at a secret time in a secret place, the forgettable end to what most here consider an unforgivable act.”

How come?

“We do not say funeral prayers for someone who kills himself. We are Muslims, and Islam does not allow anyone to shed either his own blood or that of his brothers.”

Bearak feels that he cannot let such pronouncement lie. The reader may come to believe that suicide bombers are less popular than they really are. So he hurries to set the record straight:

This is hardly a unanimous interpretation, however. On this topic, the vocabulary itself is hotly contested, for there are those who believe suicide bombers are martyrs whose sacrificial deaths are lavishly rewarded by God in paradise. “Suicide is condemned in Islam, but it is not for me to judge whether a man blows himself up as a matter of suicide or in the righteousness of jihad,” said Noor ul-Haq, a mullah in Kabul.His tiny mosque, Masjid-e-Fazilbeg, sits along Company Road, where on June 16 a man driving a taxi blew himself up near a military convoy. Five people died. Four were passers-by; the other was the bomber, left with only a right arm and a right leg.

Now isn’t this man a more reasonable, non judgmental fellow?!

Nor would Beark let Afghanis get away with claiming that most suicide bombers come from Pakistan or with their disdainful description of suicide bombers as “as impoverished, uneducated and physically or mentally handicapped.”

The young man captured before he could blow up some other people is not a low life. Just look at the way he was photographed within a circle of light and think martyr. You see, he is what the British would call “one of us.” He comes from a good family, went to a good school, completed a good Pakistani suicide bombing camp and admirably holds on to “some of his suicidal resolve.” He says he remains convinced it is a good thing to die killing U.S. soldiers.

The young man captured before he could blow up some other people is not a low life. Just look at the way he was photographed within a circle of light and think martyr. You see, he is what the British would call “one of us.” He comes from a good family, went to a good school, completed a good Pakistani suicide bombing camp and admirably holds on to “some of his suicidal resolve.” He says he remains convinced it is a good thing to die killing U.S. soldiers.No, Bearak does not see any reason to add a disclaimer to the effect that some Afghanis do not believe that U.S. soldiers should be killed. After all, what can be more “natural” than such a belief?

It all ends well, Bearak approvingly reports. The coarse grave digger ended up treating the suicide bomber with appropriate respect:

With the work finally finished, Mr. Nuruddin brushed the dust from his gray business suit. He then paused to consider the situation and opted to recite a few Koranic verses, standing first by the suicide attacker’s grave, then by the pauper’s.He wondered aloud if even this was too much Islamic ceremony for a man who had converted himself into a bomb. But he declared that he was not sorry he had gone ahead.

“After all,” he said, “the man was a human being.”

I suspect he did it because he judged it to be the safer course of action given the presence of Bearak and his photographer. Afterwards, he must have scratched his head and wondered about those “crazy” Americans.

And Bearak? He must be angling for anther Pulitzer. At the very least, he got a front page story out of it. How do you get such honors? You do as you learned in Journalism 101. You tell the story from the perspective of the “fish” even if (or more especially if) the fish happens to be a mass murderer:

The lesson I learned concerning codfish was more profound. My news-writing professor once told us a terrific anecdote. In preparing this speech, I’ve learned that the facts of the anecdote may not have been entirely correct but the spirit of the story was right and I will repeat it as it was told in class. It involves the writer Robert Benchley. While a student at Harvard in the early 1900s, he took a course in American diplomatic history. On an essay exam, the professor asked a question about a cod-fishing dispute in the Atlantic between the United States and Canada. Students were asked to explain the disagreement from a) the standpoint of the Canadians or b) the standpoint of the Americans. Benchley instead decided to answer from c) … the standpoint of the codfish.

I can’t believe I am writing this. But more and more I find myself agreeing with Michael Savage that Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder.

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