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This is true inasmuch as "wrath" is, when used technically, the sinful version of anger, but anger is not itself sinful in the Christian tradition.
Doing this is how the Soviets did it. Secret executions are the tool of repressive governments everywhere, and breed secrecy and fear. The Western tradition is one of public executions. The condemned also has, in the Western tradition, certain last rights that would be abrogated by executing him in his cell while he slept. As far as I know it is routine for other executions in the United States allow outside witnesses to attend.
You can argue that these are outdated ideas but understand that in the Western tradition you reference shooting someone in the back of the head in their cell block pattern-matches onto totalitarian regimes, whereas a public execution is pretty much the staple Anglo-American tradition.
Now you can also argue, I think, that livestreaming it is a bad idea. But it seems to me that we can address the question of if executions should be public and if they should be livestreamed separately.
Why? He killed a pregnant woman who was his comrade-in-arms.
Nidal Hasan is not a Middle Eastern terrorist, he is an American citizen and soldier, born in Virginia, who shot his fellow soldiers to death when they were unarmed in a place of trust.
I think the fact that this sentence exists demonstrates the weakness of the 'American citizen' bit in being the sole definition of who is (or should be) an American.
Clearly, calling this man is a terrorist, that's not a partisan statement. And clearly he is Middle Eastern (which is why his parents called him Nidal instead of James). His attack was motivated by his Middle Eastern religion and his attachment to his fellow Middle Easterners. He may have had American paperwork, and even an American accent, but he clearly did not consider himself American in a meaningful sense of the word.
Excellent point. Real Americans have names like 'Running Bear' or 'Flying Eagle'.
People who call their children names like that tend to identify primarily as members of their (pre-American) tribe, and not primarily as Americans, which kind of proves my point.
Oh, when you said 'American', you meant 'UnitedStates-ian'.
I'm not sure I've made my point clear. As far as I am aware, there is no coherent ideological framework that justifies giving those of English extraction a special claim to the territories of both the United Kingdom and the United States.
One can either:
claim that particular areas of land belong immutably to certain ancestral groups, which would endorse the Daily-Mail reading gammons' calls for remigration of the London-born children and grandchildren of South Asians from England, but also demand the remigration of white people form North America (and possibly the English from Scotland and Wales);
reject ancestral blood-and-soil claims, and judge individuals not by their ethnicity or the etymology of their names but by their personal actions, drawing no distinction between Mr Hasan and a hypothetical alternate-timeline perpetrator born James Anglesax, whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower or the Susan Constant and who converted to an extremist form of Islam and committed a similar massacre; or
recognise land as belonging to whichever group is capable of seizing it by force, which would dissolve any ethical high ground between 'a descendant of Englishmen killing a descendant of Arabs to maintain the status quo' and 'a descendant of Arabs killing a descendant of Englishmen to overturn the status quo', and incentivise a metric arse-load of bloodshed until partisans of option 2 manage to establish a claim on behalf of All the descendants of the last common ancestor of all humans to the third planet from a ~two octillion tonne yellow dwarf star in the Orion-Cygnus arm, for now.
All three are logically coherent, but as someone who would greatly prefer that violence be kept to a minimum, I favour the second option.
False difference. All three can be true at the same time, and indeed I think they are. This land is my land, this clay is our clay. I won this clay by slaughtering those other guys who did not speak my language. It's still their clay but now I own it and my blood will own it too later until they fumble their inheretance and give it away to people who hate them for existing. The plight of those who came before me does not make me regret owning it.
That's not all three; it's missing No. 2, i. e. the only one that gives us a chance of getting to the stars.
I do not condone what Mr Hasan did. The only reason I don't support his execution is that it leaves society with no further measures to apply to even worse crimes. Be that as it may, however, the murders at Fort Hood were a crime committed by one individual against forty-five other individuals. They were not committed by 'the Arab race' against 'the white race'. (Two of the slain, Maj. Libardo Eduardo Caraveo and Pfc. Kham See Xiong, were born in Mexico and Thailand.)
That's a nonstarter to begin with. At some point the best you can do is annihilate the criminal, regardless of the crime.
...thus, if we have the death penalty, it ought to be applied to David and Louise Turpin, and not to Nidal Hasan.
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