Enough already with the Saddam execution!

But then that You Tube video started popping up everywhere on the internet and people started forwarding me the links, like a morbid chain letter that wouldn’t go away. The last straw was this morning, when I found one more email in my junk box. I knew I needed to vent.

Let’s get things straight; I’m no Saddam fan. The man was a cold-blooded murderer, a tyrant and a bully who killed thousands of innocent civilians simply because he could. But what does that make the handful of people who taunted him and cheered as the noose was tightened around his neck and “justice� was served? What does that make the millions of people who watched and forwarded secret footage of his execution, like it was some silly Candid Camera moment?

This was bootleg footage of someone’s death. And the fact that this man was a murderer does not make it ok to watch and giggle. This was not about justice; it was about revenge. The cell phone video did not depict an execution; it depicted a lynching. It had the eerie, ugly quality of a snuff film and “managed to make a mass murderer appear dignified, while his executioners came off as bullying street thugs." (New York Times). As a hilarious addendum, following the execution, Bush declared that he wished Saddam’s execution “had been more dignified.� Right... because Dubya is the moral compass for our times.

I have consistently refused to watch the execution and deliberately looked away every time it’s been on the news. It literally makes me sick to my stomach and I have no desire to view it.

Watching a dictator die will not make me feel safer in the world, will not make me feel that justice has been served, will not make me sigh with relief that one more monster has been exterminated. If only it were that easy... Maybe my desire for revenge does not obscure my vision, but I firmly believe that two wrongs do not make a right. Didn’t they teach us that in kindergarten?

“There goes another bleeding heart. I’d like to see what she’d do if this man had killed her family.� I know that some of you are thinking that, because part of me is as well. Did he deserve punishment? Of course. Did he deserve humane punishment? I think so. I do know the families of his countless of victims would probably tell you that he never showed any mercy, so why should we show him some now?

I’ll tell you why: because we’re supposed to be better than him! Because what we despise and what we abhor in people like him is their lack of compassion and humanity and behaving just like him negates it all and makes us exactly like him. Mahatma Gandhi said that “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind�. I wish we could see that.