Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Ernie Pyle, the great World War Two journalist,  once quoted a sergeant in Italy as saying:"son of a bitch alive. . . son of a bitch dead."

Ernie, apparently, didn't believe any more in the Latin maxim "De mortuis nihil nisi bonum" than I do.

Ba'h.

And now we have this story from the BBC:

British IS recruiter Sally-Anne Jones was reportedly killed in a US drone strike in Syria, in June.

Jones, from Chatham in Kent, joined so-called Islamic State after converting to Islam and travelling to Syria in 2013.

Also from the Beeb:

A British jihadist reportedly killed by a US drone strike in Syria should have faced trial, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has said.

Asked if he would have preferred Sally-Anne Jones to be prosecuted, he said: "I think that people who have committed crimes ought to be put on trial.

"That way... when you interrogate someone, you get more information."

Jones had recruited Western girls to the so-called Islamic State after travelling to Syria in 2013.

It is understood she was killed in June, close to the border between Syria and Iraq by a US Air Force strike.

Whitehall officials have declined to comment publicly on her case, but have not denied the story.

The former punk musician from Chatham, Kent, had encouraged people to carry out attacks in Britain and had offered guidance on how to build a bomb.

Well, play stupid games, win stupid prizes, as the saying goes. 

I suppose figuring you are a Holy Warrior for a true cause, no matter how deluded, is one thing, but to urge people to blow up your fellow citizens, well, that is quite another.  Not that such conduct is unanticipated.  St. John counseled that:

. . .  in fact, the hour is coming when everyone who kills you will think he is offering worship to God.

Speaking of that cause which he served, sort of, but taking instead their fellow travelers in Afghanistan, the Canadian Boyle family, after five years of captivity in the hands of the Haqqani network, which the United States funded during the Afghan war against the Soviet Union, raped his wife and killed their newly born infant daughter.  I'm not saying that this is indicative of the views of all Muslims, but I am saying that Muslims from the Islamic regions of the globe do an oddly bad job of distinguishing their beliefs from such atrocities.

The Boyles were in the region, they have claimed as they anted to help those"who live deep inside Taliban-controlled Afghanistan where no NGO, no aid worker and no government has ever successfully been able to bring the necessary help."  Noble, perhaps, but stupid.  There is a certain amazing naive nature in some folks in the West about going to the rougher regions of the globe and believing your good will will protect you.

Beyond that, however, if reports are correct the Boyles were "hiking".  Hiking?  In Afghanistan?  What sort of a dullard takes his pregnant wife hiking in Afghanistan?

One who, apparently, actually refuses an airlift home, after being rescued, on an American aircraft in protest of the American role in Afghanistan.

Now, Mr. Boyles was married previously, it turns out, to a woman who as a cousin of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner and now he holds a dim view of his present wife's country.  But under this circumstance, if you are offered a lift on a Air Koryo, the flagship airlines of North Korea, out of there, you freaking take it.

Now, I've already violated the societal nicety of "de mortuis nihil nisi bonum" here, i.e, speaking ill of the dead, so I'll go one further.  Mr. Boyles is an ignoramus complicit, in my view, in the death of his baby and the rape of his wife.  No, he didn't do it directly, but he should have allowed it to occur.  Unless his pregnant wife decided to fly to Afghanistan and walk out into the wild country full of wild men on her own and with a gun at the head of her husband, he has blood on his hands.