If you read nothing else this weekend, you should read Michael J. Totten’s Head of the Snake post at his excellent Middle East Journal blog. Michael is one of the growing number of independent journalists who are breaking out of the rut into which their mainstream brethren have fallen, and bringing us the kind of reporting top-notch journalism should (and used to) deliver. Michael, who has extensive time and experience in the Middle East (including Libya and an extended stay in Lebanon) is now travelling through Kurdish Iraq. He has visited the genocide museum in northeastern Iraq, which has preserved the horrors of Saddam Hussein’s brutal extermination and torture of the Kurds.

It is not an easy read, but an important one nevertheless. We live in an age where moral and cultural relativism reigns unchallenged, where Palestinian suicide bombers and Israeli defense measures are treated as equivalent, where Bush = Hitler, where Ted Kennedy tells us that Sadaam’s prisons have reopened under U.S management because a few prisoners had to wear women’s underwear or be photographed naked. Though we resist it, evil must sometimes be seen face-to-face, at its very darkest: Michael shows us one of Sadaam’s prisons, in all its horror. Go, look, ponder, reflect–and never forget.

P.S. — Be sure to click his Paypal button, and contribute. Michael is doing this on his own dime, and should have your support.