What Kathy Griffin Means for Us

The most heinous aspect of the Kathy Griffin faked beheading of Donald Trump is that it shows us exactly how degraded the sensibilities of the liberal establishment have become- and how subverted they are by the Islamic Jihad. 

I do not remember, prior to Daniel Pearl’s cold-blooded murder in 2002, even being aware of beheading in the modern world. I think that, to my mind it was, back then, as distant and ancient as impaling and crucifixion. After February 1, 2002 cutting the head off of a living human being with a knife became a particular and real horror. In an attempt to understand what happened to him, I found the video on line.The utter barbarity, the bloody reality, the ghastly psychopathic cruelty of the act was overpowering. This rough disconnection of the head from the body, accompanied by the flood of life’s blood is at once a terrifying, spectacular mutilation and a desecration of the most elemental spiritual wholeness of humanity. The mouth is open, the eyes go dull and if we fail to be horrified, we die inside ourselves.

I recognized it right away as a close cousin of the gas chambers, firing squads, death trucks and starvation of the holocaust. What sane American in the early twentieth century could have seen those coming? The numbers of victims were not the same but they were both cases of how the human mind can calculate its way- rage and reason its way- to doing deeds of previously unthinkable evil. Anyway, didn’t Stalin say that “the death of one person is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic”?

Now, more than 15 years later, beheadings are common, almost daily occurrences. The brutal savages post videos and pictures of them on the internet as terror tactics. How many people in the west have watched one of them- or even made themselves look at one of the pictures?  I wonder if Kathy Griffin ever watched one of those videos. They are real and they are happening all the time.

As unthinkable and despicable as joking about “Lynching president Obama” was for the past eight years, there had been no epidemic of racial lynchings for many decades to give them a similar dimension of possibility. Even the catcalls against Jews who support Israel that “the gas chambers are waiting” and “kill the Jews” taunts that are heard in anti-Israel demonstrations around the world are not as immediate and visceral as beheading is today. Only to people who are not paying attention the wholesale murder of innocent Christians and Jews in the Islamic Jihad is a beheading anodyne enough to be a subject of a humorous satire. This is the worst horror of Kathy Griffin and her failed jape, It is yet another how so many of us are unwilling to look squarely at the most immediate threat to all of us. 

She doesn’t get it. Nor do the rest of the clucking liberal press who are all in some degree sympathetic in their condemnations. They think it was “inappropriate”. Beheading is not funny,  it is not merely inappropriate, it is emblematic of how the barbaric Jihad is beginning to incrementally succeed in separating our minds from our hearts and our souls.