[Vision2020] Saddam Now Martyr Among World's Sunnis

[Pat Kraut]

Oh, Please! They would have made a hero of him no matter what
happened...logic has nothing to do with any choosing of heros in the middle
east nor anywhere else. He was of their party he did good for them and they
don't care about anyone in the other party. Heros are often choosen by a
group based on only what they think not the whole truth.
But, once again there is an expectation that the rule of law will be
followed up on and something will happen to the person who taped it on their
phone. Saddam would have thought it was funny.  I do see changes in Iraq and
I don't much care if you don't see them.




----- Original Message ----- 
From: <nickgier at adelphia.net>
To: <vision2020 at moscow.com>
Sent: Saturday, January 06, 2007 9:50 AM
Subject: [Vision2020] Saddam Now Martyr Among World's Sunnis


Greetings:

Those who understand the Arabic on the video of the hanging say that the
trap door was sprung right in the middle of Saddam's final prayer.

The report below says that Saddam has beocme "a Sunni Arab hero who stood
calm and composed as his Shiite executioners tormented and abused him."

Just a reminder: Sunnis make up 90 percent of the world's Muslims.

“All our hatred for him suddenly turned into sympathy, sympathy with someone
who was treated unjustly by an occupation force and its collaborators.”

“He stood as strong as a mountain while he was being hanged,” said Ahmed
el-Ghamrawi, a former Egyptian ambassador to Iraq.

The Libyans plan to erect a statue honoring him.

Even the American soldiers who handed him over the government said that
Saddam acted with calm and dignity.

January 6, 2007, NY Times
Images of Hanging Make Hussein a Martyr to Many
By HASSAN M. FATTAH

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Jan. 5 — In the week since Saddam Hussein was hanged in an
execution steeped in sectarian overtones, his public image in the Arab
world, formerly that of a convicted dictator, has undergone a resurgence of
admiration and awe.

On the streets, in newspapers and over the Internet, Mr. Hussein has emerged
as a Sunni Arab hero who stood calm and composed as his Shiite executioners
tormented and abused him.

“No one will ever forget the way in which Saddam was executed,” President
Hosni Mubarak of Egypt remarked in an interview with the Israeli newspaper
Yediot Aharonot published Friday and distributed by the official Egyptian
news agency. “They turned him into a martyr.”

In Libya, which canceled celebrations of the feast of Id al-Adha after the
execution, a government statement said a statue depicting Mr. Hussein in the
gallows would be erected, along with a monument to Omar al-Mukhtar, who
resisted the Italian invasion of Libya and was hanged by the Italians in
1931.

In Morocco and the Palestinian territories, demonstrators held aloft
photographs of Mr. Hussein and condemned the United States.

Here in Beirut, hundreds of members of the Lebanese Baath Party and
Palestinian activists marched Friday in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood
behind a symbolic coffin representing that of Mr. Hussein and later offered
a funeral prayer. Photographs of Mr. Hussein standing up in court, against a
backdrop of the Dome of the Rock shrine in Jerusalem, were pasted on city
walls near Palestinian refugee camps, praising “Saddam the martyr.”

“God damn America and its spies,” a banner across one major Beirut
thoroughfare read. “Our condolences to the nation for the assassination of
Saddam, and victory to the Iraqi resistance.”

By standing up to the United States and its client government in Baghdad and
dying with seeming dignity, Mr. Hussein appears to have been virtually
cleansed of his past.

“Suddenly we forgot that he was a dictator and that he killed thousands of
people,” said Roula Haddad, 33, a Lebanese Christian. “All our hatred for
him suddenly turned into sympathy, sympathy with someone who was treated
unjustly by an occupation force and its collaborators.”

Just a month ago Mr. Hussein was widely dismissed as a criminal who deserved
the death penalty, even if his trial was seen as flawed. Much of the Middle
East reacted with a collective shrug when he was found guilty of crimes
against humanity in November.

But shortly after his execution last Saturday, a video emerged that showed
Shiite guards taunting Mr. Hussein, who responded calmly but firmly to them.
>From then on, many across the region began looking at him as a martyr.

“The Arab world has been devoid of pride for a long time,” said Ahmad Mazin
al-Shugairi, who hosts a television show at the Middle East Broadcasting
Center that promotes a moderate version of Islam in Saudi Arabia. “The way
Saddam acted in court and just before he was executed, with dignity and no
fear, struck a chord with Arabs who are desperate for their own leaders to
have pride too.”

Ayman Safadi, editor in chief of the independent Jordanian daily Al Ghad,
said, “The last image for many was of Saddam taken out of a hole. That has
all changed now.”

At the heart of the sudden reversal of opinion was the symbolism of the
hasty execution, now framed as an act of sectarian vengeance shrouded in
political theater and overseen by the American occupation.

In much of the predominantly Sunni Arab world, the timing of the execution
in the early hours of Id al-Adha, which is among the holiest days of the
Muslim year, when violence is forbidden and when even Mr. Hussein himself
sometimes released prisoners, was seen as a direct insult to the Sunni
world.

The contrast between the official video aired without sound on Iraqi
television of Mr. Hussein being taken to the gallows and fitted with a noose
around his neck and the unauthorized grainy, chaotic recording of the same
scene with sound, depicting Shiite militiamen taunting Mr. Hussein with his
hands tied, damning him to hell and praising the militant Shiite cleric
Moktada al-Sadr, touched a sectarian nerve.

“He stood as strong as a mountain while he was being hanged,” said Ahmed
el-Ghamrawi, a former Egyptian ambassador to Iraq. “He died a strong
president and lived as a strong president. This is the image people are left
with.”

Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian media critic and director of the online radio
station Ammannet.net, said: “If Saddam had media planners, he could not have
planned it better than this. Nobody could ever have imagined that Saddam
would have gone down with such dignity.”

Writers and commentators have stopped short of eulogizing the dictator but
have looked right past his bloody history as they compare Iraq’s present
circumstances with Iraq under Mr. Hussein.

In Jordan, long a bastion of support for Mr. Hussein, many are lionizing
him, decrying the timing of the execution and the taunts as part of a
Sunni-Shiite conflict.

“Was it a coincidence that Israel, Iran and the United States all welcomed
Saddam’s execution?” wrote Hamadeh Faraneh, a columnist for the daily Al
Rai. “Was it also a coincidence when Saddam said bravely in front of his
tormentors, ‘Long live the nation,’ and that Palestine is Arab, then uttered
the declaration of faith? His last words expressed his depth and what he
died for.”

Another Jordanian journalist, Muhammad Abu Rumman, wrote in Al Ghad on
Thursday: “For the vast majority Saddam is a martyr, even if he made
mistakes in his first years of rule. He cleansed himself later by
confronting the Americans and by rejecting to negotiate with them.”

Even the pro-Saudi news media, normally critical of Mr. Hussein, chimed in
with a more sentimental tone.

In the London-based pan-Arab daily Al Hayat, Bilal Khubbaiz, commenting on
Iranian and Israeli praise of the execution, wrote, “Saddam, as Iraq’s
ruler, was an iron curtain that prevented the Iranian influence from
reaching into the Arab world,” as well as “a formidable party in the
Arab-Israeli conflict.”

Zuhayr Qusaybati, also writing in Al Hayat, said the Iraqi prime minister,
Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, “gave Saddam what he most wanted: he turned him into a
martyr in the eyes of many Iraqis, who can now demand revenge.”

“The height of idiocy,” Mr. Qusaybati said, “is for the man who rules
Baghdad under American protection not to realize the purpose of rushing the
execution, and that the guillotine carries the signature of a Shiite figure
as the flames of sectarian division do not spare Shiites or Sunnis in a
country grieving for its butchered citizens.”

In Saudi Arabia, poems eulogizing Mr. Hussein have been passed around on
cellphones and in e-mail messages.

“Prepare the gun that will avenge Saddam,” a poem published in a Saudi
newspaper warned. “The criminal who signed the execution order without valid
reason cheated us on our celebration day. How beautiful it will be when the
bullet goes through the heart of him who betrayed Arabism.”

Mr. Safadi, the Jordanian editor, said: “In the public’s perception Saddam
was terrible, but those people were worse. That final act has really
jeopardized the future of Iraq immensely. And we all know this is a blow to
the moderate camp in the Arab world.”

Reporting was contributed by Mona el-Naggar from Cairo, Nada Bakri from
Beirut, Rasheed Abou al-Samh from Jidda, Saudi Arabia, and Suha Maayeh from
Amman.

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