Beaten Fox News Journalists: Arab crowd went straight for our heads
Marc Schenker
Feb. 7, 2011
Beaten Fox News Journalists: Arab crowd went straight for our heads. A few days after being pummeled nearly to death by crowds of pro-Mubarak Arab thugs on the streets of Egypt, Fox News journalists Greg Palkot and Olaf Wiig finally felt strong enough to appear on camera and give first-hand testimony of what kind of barbarism they suffered at the hands of said thugs. To hear Palkot and Wiig tell their story, it sounded like they were right in the middle of a war zone in Tahrir Square. Particularly telling is Palkot’s testimony that the Arab crowd intentionally made a target of the journalists’ heads, which they repeatedly beat over and over and over again. Adding insult to injury, both men were interrogated by the Egyptians before being finally released.
In an interview on the same channel they work for, the men gave an unsettling account of the merciless savagery that they encountered at the hands of the Arab thugs. Their troubles began when the structure they were reporting from during the height of the violence in Tahrir Square came under siege. As the reporter and cameraman fled into the streets, they found themselves unluckily right before a pro-Mubarak crowd of thugs.
The description of the savagery of their beating, in my mind at least, demonstrates to me the knack for barbarity in the Arab world and culture. According to Wiig, the crowd was fighting over themselves to grab at the journalists, grabbing them four and five at a time. Truly shocking was Palkot’s assertion that it only took a short span of 30 seconds before both men were literally swarmed over—as Palkot put it, “all over us”—by the crowd of angry Arabs. 30 seconds?!! That is so aggressively fast that it is reminiscent of a pack of wild lions being all over some prey animal in the wilds of Africa. Verily, the Middle East is an extremely violent region where respect for law and basic human rights just does not seem to be very high up on the priority list.
I had to chuckle to myself with a little bit of disdain at the naivety of cameraman Wiig, who confessed that he initially thought that he could reason with these Arab thugs not to go ahead with their beating of the two men! Whoa! That is some wishful thinking there, and it is also surprising as hell because Wiig should know better than to think that some Arabs can be reasoned with. After all, as astute readers will remember, back in 2006, he and another Fox News journalist, Steve Centanni, were kidnapped by Arab terrorists! So why Wiig thought that he could still reason with these, ahem, “people” is beyond me.
The way this crowd inflicted its beating on the two men was as shocking as the injuries suffered by Palkot and Wiig. According to Palkot, the crowd used open hands, fists, sticks, rocks, and metal bars—basically anything and everything—to brutalize the two. Further, while the Arab thugs focused on the heads of the two men—obviously, going for the kill—they pummeled the Fox News journalists all over their bodies, too. Wiig’s back, in his own words, looks like “modern art” because it is all black and blue, and he has two of the nastiest-looking lacerations on the back of his head, not to mention badly damaged-looking eyeballs. According to Palkot, he was hit so hard that he was momentarily left blinded and at a loss for hearing in his left ear!!
This is what some Egyptians do to you in Egypt if you are a member of the media (and probably because you are white and from the West, too). How is anyone going to believe that very many Egyptians can actually handle democracy when it supposedly will come after Mubarak (assuming, of course, that this supposed democracy “movement” evades being hijacked by the Islamonazis in the Muslim Brotherhood)? The Egyptians are going to have to work on their institutionalized problem of beating down the free press first, before they can aspire to a real democracy.