by arthur Weinreb, associate Editor,
May 24, 2004
Michael Berg, the peace activist father of Nicholas Berg, the 26-year-old who was beheaded in Iraq, wrote a column that appeared in The Guardian newspaper last Friday. The Guardian, for anyone who is unfamiliar with the publication, is a left wing British broadsheet that leads all other major newspapers in the U.K. when it comes to america and Bush bashing. Berg was in London to attend an "emergency rally" on May 22 that was put on by the Stop the War Coalition to "End the Torture — Bring the Troops Home Now". Needless to say, the reference to torture was in regards to what took place at abu Ghraib and not anything that all those cute little Iraqi insurgents might have done.
In some of his comments, Michael Berg came across as the grieving father that he undoubtedly is. He talked about how his son was "the kindest gentlest human being I have ever known" and about how George W. Bush is the poorer for never having had the opportunity to look into his son’s eyes.
The gist of the column however, was that George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and company were responsible for his son’s death and are more to blame than the human trash that carried out the actual kidnapping and murder. It’s hard to understand his reasoning how Bush is responsible for his son’s death. after all George Bush did nothing that changed the nature of Iraq between the time that Nick Berg went to that country and the time that he was killed. George Bush didn’t order the younger Berg to go to Iraq. He wasn’t a soldier who was forced to go to Iraq. He wasn’t even a kid from appalachia who chose to enter the armed forces because he or she didn’t want to pursue their only other career choice of working in a fast food restaurant and then found themselves in a war zone where they had no desire to be. No, the decision to go to Iraq was Nick Berg’s and George Bush is in no way to blame for that fatal decision. Michael Berg writes that his son "was in Iraq to help people without any expectation of personal gain", yet media reports indicate that he was pursuing business interests as a contractor in that country. Perhaps we will really never know why Nicholas Berg left the relative safety of the United States to go to a war zone teaming with insurgents.
although Nicholas Berg in no way deserved his fate, he is not the most sympathetic of victims. as already indicated, he was not forced to go to Iraq. He was not in the same position as a Daniel Pearl who, as a journalist did what journalists, police officers, firefighters and others do. They go where they go to do their jobs and know that their safety cannot be guaranteed. Nick Berg was a Jewish american who traveled with an american passport that contained an Israeli stamp in it. although he was advised to travel with an escort or a translator he chose to travel alone with that passport in a land teaming with fundamentalist extremists and refused to leave the country when advised to so do. Only someone with a pre-existing deep hatred of George W. Bush could blame the president for Nicholas Berg’s demise.
But Michael Berg goes far beyond just blaming George Bush for his son’s death. Berg writes, "Even more than the murderers who took my son’s life, I can’t stand those who sit and make policies to end lives and break the lives of the still living". So he despises Bush and Rumsfeld, more than the terrorist who took a dull knife and slowly sawed the neck of his screaming son. Berg attributes feelings to his son’s killers and is convinced that "for just a brief moment, [they] did not like what they were doing." In reference to the events of 9/11 Nick Berg’s father thinks that the United States should have stopped "speaking to the people we labelled our enemies and start listening to them". The United States "labelled" them as enemies? al-Qaeda labelled themselves enemies when the first plane hit the World Trade Centre if not before. and in what appears to be a sarcastic jab at the president, Berg uses the word "evildoer" but talks about "evildoers on both sides of the atlantic".
Michael Berg gushes sympathy and understanding, not only for his son’s killers but for all those who were responsible for the atttacks on September 11, 2001. He seems to share the terrorists’ deep seated hatred of the West and anyone who really thinks that George Bush is more responsible to what happened to his son than the ones who killed him has to have as much hatred of George Bush as the terrorists do. Let’s hope not too much time is wasted sympathizing with Michael Berg.