Responding to the president’s now-rescinded decision to livestream the execution of Palestinian-American Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people on a Texas military base, the board said: “the idea of broadcasting his execution publicly — livestreaming it! — is beyond grotesque”.
The statement added, “America is supposed to be a model nation, with the highest values, a shining light that leads the world into a civilized future. The spectacle of a publicized, glamorized execution sends us in the opposite direction.”
For once, Murdoch’s opinion-makers reached a breaking point with the despotic presidency.
They weren’t alone among conservatives in voicing outrage at the idea of a public execution.
Broadcaster Andrew Napolitano on Newsmax, an even more right-wing outlet, said: “Federal law prohibits the broadcast of killings.”
The more erudite Murdoch editorial board of The Wall Street Journal opined Hasan’s “execution is best done quietly with few witnesses beyond officials and the families of the victims who wish to attend” because it would consign “him to history with ignominy but no fanfare”.
The livestream would “assist the cult of death promoted by the perversion of Islam seeking to recruit more suicide attackers” and “would serve as a YouTube recruiting video”, the board said.
Kathryn Jean Lopez, religion editor of the National Review, another respected publication on the American right, delivered a damning assessment.
“This is disgusting,” she wrote. Lopez, a conservative Catholic, continued, “The death of human beings is not for show. Is this for our entertainment? I fear that’s actually the reason.”
Republicans in Congress also spoke out against the announcement.
Vice President JD Vance–who, as a Catholic, should theologically oppose the death penalty entirely–voiced doubt about whether this December spectacle of state murder would even happen.
It turned out he was on to something. Paul S. Coakley, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, condemned the idea of a public execution, as did the Pope.
National Association of Evangelicals President Walter Kim told Religion News Service that the Trump Administration was “promoting a culture of death” with its announcement.
Trump backtracked, saving the world from this spectacle of blood. But the announcement has already caused considerable damage to the national psyche, even though it was rescinded.
For our European readers who might be confused by the complexity of the American death penalty, let’s go over a few nuances.
Most of the death sentences you see in the news, like the botched execution of Christa Pike, happen at the state level. In those cases, governors have jurisdiction, not the president.
Far fewer executions take place in the federal system. When Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was executed in 2001, he was the first federal inmate to be executed since 1963.
Since then, federal executions have been highly partisan affairs.
According to the US Bureau of Prisons’ records, McVeigh was the first of three federal inmates to die under the Republican presidency of George W. Bush, while President Barack Obama, a Democrat, didn’t see federal executions in his eight-year term.
Obama told the Marshall Project he found the death penalty “deeply troubling”.
The first Trump Administration carried out more than a dozen executions, most of them in 2020. One of Democrat Joe Biden’s last major acts as president was to commute most federal death sentences.
Today, three federal civilian inmates–Robert Bowers (the Tree of Life synagogue shooter), Dylann Roof (the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church shooter) and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (one of the Boston Marathon bombers)–await scheduling of their executions.
Two of these men, Roof and Bowers, embody the Antisemitic and white supremacist rage that anchors Make America Great Again nationalism.
Hasan is in the US military justice system–a separate matter, though still at the federal level. The last person executed under the military system was John Bennett, an Army private, in 1961.
The Trump Administration, always on the prowl for new obscene theatre for his base, was given the chance to publicly execute Hasan, a US Army psychiatrist whose obsession with radical Islam led to his murderous outburst.
Despite cancelling the grotesque public display, Trump has very much used Hasan’s case to frame Palestine as an American enemy.
Hasan’s execution might have flown under the radar of the frenzied news cycle that overwhelms most Americans. Instead, Trump injected it into the headlines.
This has the effect of scaring the public into thinking that Palestinians are in our own house, ready to commit a 7 October-style attack at any time.
This announcement—and its pullback—is undoubtedly about Trump’s falling popularity.
The unending war in Iran, rising gas prices, and other turmoil could spell disaster for Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections.
They have good reason to be worried. Trump and his minions stop at nothing to shift the news agenda.
There might not be a Super Bowl-like event for Hasan’s execution, as some had feared.
But no one should lose sight of the gravity of this announcement.
Photograph by Sgt. John Ortiz courtesy of U.S. Army Photo/Wikipedia. Image Public Domain.
