5.23.2007 | How the mighty have fallen

"And David lamented with this lamentation over Saul and Jonathan his son..." This, from 2 Samuel 17, describes David's great sorrow at the evil which had overtaken Saul. This is the passage that occurred to me as I read this account of two former stalwarts of human rights: the American Civil Liberties Union, and Amnesty International.

On the ACLU, we've got, from the Wall Street Journal, the sadly accurate headline, "The American Liberal Liberties Union". The thesis? The ACLU tends to ignore cases where it disapproves of the content of the speech. And, of course, like all good multi-cultis, weigh in with vigor whenever the rights of Muslims to blow us up in the name of the Religion of Peace whenever there is "hate speech" about.

For the ACLU, "hate speech" may best be translated as: "Say nothing that even remotely criticizes Muslims, members of other approved minority groups, or the unfettered 'right' of a woman to kill her unborn child." As for the rights of Christians to proclaim our views? Fugeddaboutit.

Then there are the pro-terrorists over at Amnesty International. If a Jew in Israel looks cockeyed at an Arab terrorist, that's a human rights violation. If the Arab blows up a pizzeria or a rocket kills an innocent woman (as happened just this morning, thanks to the terrorists of Hamas), well, those poor Arabs are freedom fighters.

The story is told in this New York Sun opinion piece. An objective man might think that Israel, with a robust, functioning democracy, complete with the rule of law, is somewhat better than places where you can be killed for being a Jew or Christian. You might think this; you'd be wrong if you were only to read what AI puts out.

By way of example, from the Sun article:

...in 2006, Amnesty singled out Israel for condemnation of human rights to a far greater extent than Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Syria, Egypt, and other chronic abusers of human rights.

This kind of a double standard might be called anti-Semitism, but then Amnesty also is fierce in the protection of any terrorist who has been taken off the jihadi rolls and given that life of tropical ease at Gitmo.

The ACLU, Amnesty International, and others of that ilk might be only annoyances. But they reflect a dangerous mindset in the West: America, Israel, believing Christians, Jews, those in favor of actual free speech and civil liberties for all, must be put in their place. And actual enemies of freedom, who inhabit much of the Muslim world, must be treated with kid gloves lest they take offense.

1.02.2007 | "They want victory"

Today you may find, in an abbreviated version, the heart of the reason why our investment in Iraq will not pay any dividends. Not if one expects a return in the form of a peaceful, truly democratic nation called "Iraq" that is not just a bunch of ethnic and confessional -stans cobbled together with spit and bailing wire.

The article, by the author Mark Bowden ("Black Hawk Down"), includes this quotation from Michael Sheehan, former ambassador for counter-terrorism that sums up the situation in tribal places such as Iraq:

The idea used to be that terrible countries were terrible because good, decent, innocent people were being oppressed by evil, thuggish leaders. Somalia changed that. Here you have a country where just about everybody is caught up in the fighting. You stop an old lady on the street and ask her if she wants peace, and she will say, 'Yes, of course, I pray for it daily.' All the things you would expect her to say. Then ask her if she would be willing for her clan to share power with another to have that peace, and she'll say, 'With those murderers and thieves? I'd die first.' People in these countries . . . don't want peace. They want victory. They want power. Men, women, old, and young. Somalia was the experience that taught us that people in these places bear much of the responsibility for things being the way they are. The hatred and killing continues because they want it to. Or because they don't want peace enough to stop it.

"They want victory." And will settle for nothing less. It is only the whip and the lash and the boot of the dictator that can tame those for whom clan, tribe, confession, and ethnicity trump all else. Or, put more simply, those for whom blood triumphs over reason.

This describes most of mankind. The United States is the leading, and, some might claim, the only successful version of the alternative: a nation whose founding reflects the post-Enlightenment notion that free men can create a nation built on an idea. In our case, the idea, at least in theory, is that each of us has certain, inalienable rights, vested in us not by any political entity, but by God.

Those rights may vary from telling to telling, but in our founding documents, they are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Not just for Kurds. Not just for Sunni Arabs. Not just for any single group, but for all.

Iraq may never get there, but whether or not they do, I don't believe the journey is worth more American lives.