Warning: Do Not Try This Wading At Home. Experienced Professionals At work.
The Free Republic (Google it as I won't link there) reacted in the expected wingnut manner to the decision that Zacarias Moussaoui was not going to be given the death sentence: Lots of anger and wishes that he'd be killed while in prison but only after many years of suffering and so on, lots of anger at the members of the jury and suspicions that they are all liberals, and also some Kerry blaming.
Then there were the comments on the feminization of America as the cause for our downfall (the downfall of not killing Moussaoui promptly and in a stern and masculine manner). The most extreme of these comments is this one:
I agree. People who have no brains will think killing him would have made him a hero to the Muslims. Actually NOT killing him has made us look like weak , spineless saps to a society who respects ONLY strenght and violence. To that culture we are now not to be feared , they are laughing at our feminine court system. DISGUSTING I say . Real men would have strung his ass up outside the courtroom on national TV and used it as a warning to the rest of the Islamic scumbags out there.We're lost I tell you , LOST !!!!!
Now this is interesting. What Al Qaeida wants is a world where women are neither seen nor heard, where women have few rights and essentially no opportunity to be independent human beings. Where beheading is the way one demonstrates power. Yet this opponent of Al Qaeida seems to want fairly similar things. There is the association of femininity with weakness and spinelessness, the urging to do public executions as a way to show masculine might.
Osama bin Laden would like this way of thinking. His war is a war against modernity, against secularity and against things such as women's rights. He wants to destroy modernity, and the opponents from the other side seem to want to help him do just that thing.