ISIS beheaded Steven Sotloff and the world watched, no one intervened. We let it happen.There was no rescue.I am fairly sick over the fact that our world has become so desensitized to the vulgarity and cruelty of the world that not only was it allowed to happen, we were allowed to watch the video. It wasn’t just photo stills, it was his brutal murder. All we could do is sit stunned and watch. It made me sick in my stomach, just the way I felt the day I watched the planes crash into the World Trade Center.
The news is over saturated with entertainment. While sad, these things seem inconsequential in comparison to what happened to Steven Sotloff and the brutality with which it was carried out. Leaked photos are not a national crisis in comparison to beheadings. We live in a world today where reality television is a mainstay and we’re all flies on the wall of society. But still, we do nothing. Nothing has changed except that now we KNOW, we see the awful things happening in real time. It’s disgusting. We are going to raise a generation of desensitized children. Soon, beheadings will no longer shock us at all. One day, my children’s children will not be rattled to their core as I am today.
What are we doing? I just watched the video that ISIS released of the American Journalist, Steven Joel Sotloff, a human being, have his head cut off very crudely with a hunting knife in the dessert, by a masked ISIS executioner as restitution for what our government has done. The brutality and coldness with which the executioner beheaded another human being, snuffed his life out, was nothing short of evil. I am in shock.
“just as your missiles continue to strike our people, our knife will continue to strike the necks of your people”
I don’t know how these things happen. How people, the general public, become pawns of government politics and terrorists. This man was not a soldier. He did not go to a foreign land to fight. He posed no threat. He was just someone’s son, doing a job, and because he happened to be American in a country that hates Americans, he was murdered like an animal. He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The executioner crudely and callously sawed his head off with a hand held knife. It wasn’t a smooth motion to slit a throat, it was a hack job. This took calculated effort and a desire to finish the job. It took hatred. There was no compassion or humanity. There wasn’t even the courtesy of an ax. There was only brutality.
The whole thing was filmed and at the end, there in the dirt lay some mother’s son murdered, dead in the sand with his head placed on top of his corpse in some disrespectful, cartoonish way like a trophied kill by a hunter only this wasn’t an animal, it was a human being. This man was someone’s everything. He didn’t deserve to be beheaded. He didn’t die in the name of his God or his convictions and beliefs, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and no one rescued him.
Right before Sotloff died, he spoke calmly to the camera speaking words that I am sure he was forced to say under extreme duress, but he was eerily calm and resigned to his fate. In the end, he didn’t even resist. I think he had given up or was sedated or perhaps, just refused to give his executioner that last satisfaction of his fear. He’d given up waiting for his hero to rescue him. Given up on living. Given up on trying and wishing and praying.
I hate the Internet for giving these terrorists a venue. I won’t share the video as I don’t want to be part of the problem and really, I am doing you a favor by not sharing it. Don’t look for it. I will never forget what I saw in that video. It shook me to my core. I can’t unsee what I just saw and I can’t stop crying for this poor man and his mother who so desperately begged for his release and his life. It was warned that Steven Joel Sotloff would be beheaded after journalist James Foley was beheaded two weeks ago. Still, Sotloff was not rescued. Our government did not heed the warnings. No one did anything, other than his mother who publicly begged for her son’s life. Now, she gets to see her son, who looks tired and gaunt, in his last minutes before he is murdered speaking his last words and then she has to watch helplessly as he is savagely butchered by a terrorist. And finally, the baby boy that she once held in her arms and soothed to sleep, is laid out on the floor like garbage as a warning to Americans.
I understand that we do not negotiate with terrorists but the longer we take to “develop military strategies” safely from within the U.S. borders, more innocent Americans ( real life human beings not ideas or policies) are being brutally murdered, in real time, by ISIS. Did we learn nothing from 9/11/01? What are our leaders waiting for, ISIS to come to our country and go door-to-door beheading innocents to prove their point? How many mother’s sons have to die before we do something?
Today, I am saddened , sickened and shocked with the world and more specifically by ISIS and the Internet. I pray for the family of Steven Joel Sotloff, especially his mother, whose heart I know is irreparably broken, that she can know peace in the knowledge that those assholes can no longer terrorize him or hurt him.