...One of Cole's angles is to emphasize the brutality of all occupations, which he highlights by telling this story of a French atrocity:

At one point, the French are said to have brought 900 heads of slain insurgents to Cairo in bags and ostentatiously dumped them out before a crowd in one of that city's major squares to instill Cairenes with terror. (Two centuries later, the American public would come to associate decapitations by Muslim terrorists in Iraq with the ultimate in barbarism, but even then hundreds of such beheadings were not carried out at once.)

Right away, there's something unhinged about the part in the parentheses, which seems to plead on behalf of the video decapitators in Iraq. ("Your honor, we only did them one at a time.") But Cole went even further in prepared remarks he delivered at the Washington-based New America Foundation on August 24. Again he told the story of the French dumping heads in a Cairo square, with this addition: "We now associate beheadings with Islamic terrorism. But Bonaparte and the French Republic of course were the great beheaders initially. It was a very modern technique."

It was a very modern technique. If he'd said it in Q&A, I'd let it pass. But he said it in prepared remarks. I won't even begin the litany of historical precedents, stretching back to antiquity. But I will link here to an article by Timothy Furnish, "Beheading in the Name of Islam," which looks at decapitation in Islamic theology and history, and shows that it's been a sanctioned punishment from the very beginning, for criminals, dissidents, rebels, and defeated enemies. Most famously, the Prophet Muhammad ordered 600 to 900 men of the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza executed by decapitation. Muhammad and his followers would seem to have had a millennium's head start over Napoleon in the race for the title of initial "great beheaders."

Cole's description of beheading as "very modern" isn't just a mistake. It tells you just how driven he is to blame the West for everything he deplores and relativize even the most revolting acts of Muslim terrorism. Terrorists are cutting off heads in Iraq? The West started the beheading with Napoleon, so we're just reaping what we've sown. They use terror? It's because Bush, like Napoleon, has followed "the strategy of ruling by terror and swift, draconian punishment for acts of resistance." We are guilty not only of our sins. We are guilty of theirs, by our example and our actions. You see, until we came along, everyone got to keep his head...