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Related: About this forumHow many American Weddings would have to get hit by Drones before they were Banned?
http://www.juancole.com/2013/12/american-weddings-drones.htmlHow many American Weddings would have to get hit by Drones before they were Banned?
By Juan Cole | Dec. 21, 2013
(By Tom Engelhardt)
The headline Bride and Boom! was spectacular, if you think killing people in distant lands is a blast and a half. Of course, you have to imagine that smirk line in giant black letters with a monstrous exclamation point covering most of the bottom third of the front page of the Murdoch-owned New York Post. The reference was to a caravan of vehicles on its way to or from a wedding in Yemen that was eviscerated, evidently by a U.S. drone via one of those surgical strikes of which Washington is so proud. As one report put it, Scorched vehicles and body parts were left scattered on the road.
It goes without saying that such a headline could only be applied to assumedly dangerous foreigners terror or al-Qaeda suspects in distant lands whose deaths carry a certain quotient of weirdness and even amusement with them. Try to imagine the equivalent for the Newtown massacre the day after Adam Lanza broke into Sandy Hook Elementary School and began killing children and teachers. Since even the New York Post wouldnt do such a thing, lets posit that the Yemen Post did, that playing off the phrase head of the class, their headline was: Dead of the Class! (with that same giant exclamation point). It would be sacrilege. The media would descend. The tastelessness of Arabs would be denounced all the way up to the White House. Youd hear about the callousness of foreigners for days.
And were a wedding party to be obliterated on a highway anywhere in America on the way to, say, a rehearsal dinner, whatever the cause, it would be a 24/7 tragedy. Our lives would be filled with news of it. Count on that.
But a bunch of Arabs in a country few in the U.S. had ever heard of before we started sending in the drones? No such luck, so if youre a Murdoch tabloid, its open season, no consequences guaranteed. As it happens, Bride and Boom! isnt even an original. It turns out to be a stock Post headline. Google it and youll find that, since 9/11, the paper has used it at least twice before last week, and never for the good guys: once in 2005, for the first bomb-making husband and wife, two Palestinian newlyweds arrested by the Israelis; and once in 2007, for a story about a bride, decked out in a princess-style wedding gown, with her groom. Their car was stopped at a checkpoint in Iraq by our Iraqis, and both of them turned out to be male terrorists in a nutty nuptial party. Ba-boom!
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How many American Weddings would have to get hit by Drones before they were Banned? (Original Post)
unhappycamper
Dec 2013
OP
Alkene
(752 posts)1. Horrifying. n/t
democrank
(11,104 posts)2. What have we become?
burnsei sensei
(1,820 posts)3. I still think the chickens have yet to come home
to roost concerning ww2.
If you really think we could meet out such destruction without getting it back at some point, you're crazy.
MisterP
(23,730 posts)4. infinite: they'd just create Drone Owners of America to say that the victims shouldn't be listened
to and that there's more drones in the countryside but no drone deaths and Hitler and democracy's when the lamb has a gun