The Legacy Media Lose Their Heads

A Yeoman of the Guard

I could barely believe my ears when I heard an interviewer and an interviewee on CNN agree that the US was guilty of “hypocrisy” for objecting to ISIS's practice of beheading hostages while Saudi Arabia, an American ally, was beheading people. Then I did a quick web search, and discovered that the Globe and Mail, Newsweek, and other legacy media were making exactly the same accusation.

How could CNN have become so depraved? This, after all, was seeing a moral equivalence between murder and capital punishment. Criminals executed in Saudi Arabia have been convicted of capital crimes in a court of law, with rather stringent evidentiary requirements. The hostages killed by ISIS were innocent people being killed because of their ethnic background.

Presumably, this has to do with a prejudice against beheading as a form of execution. If so, that id all it is—pure prejudice. Logically, a good quick beheading is probably the most painless form of execution we can manage. All the evidence suggests it is less painful than lethal injection, as practiced in the US. Traditionally, in England, the common people were executed by hanging; nobles had the right to be executed by beheading. This was, of course, because it was believed to be less painful. So long, that is, as the executioner is an experienced professional.

Hanging, drawing and quartering was on the statute books in the United Kingdom until 1814. For crimes such as being Catholic.

Saudi Arabia also is being faulted by some of these sources for performing its executions in public. We in the West now consider this in bad taste, but there are good arguments for it. If an unpopular government executes a political opponent in public, it risks triggering a general uprising. Accordingly, in the old days, it was a matter of honesty and honour for the government to execute only in public, to demonstrate that everything was above board. Bad governments tortured and executed in the dark. That Saudi Arabia executes only in public is, in the end, a guarantee of honest government and Saudi freedom.