Common Folk Using Common Sense

Spurred by a tip from a detainee, a multinational military force stormed a house in western Baghdad early today and rescued two Canadians and a Briton who had been held hostage by a shadowy guerrilla group for nearly four months.

James Loney, 41, and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32, both from Canada; and Norman Kember, 74, from Britain, were discovered bound and sequestered in a house in a residential district of the capital, officials reported. The three were whisked to the fortified Green Zone and debriefed by the authorities but did not address the media, officials said.

The men, all activists working for Christian Peacemaker Teams, had been captured Nov. 26 along with an American colleague, Tom Fox, 54, of Clear Brook, Va., whose body was discovered March 9 wrapped in plastic and dumped on a trash pile in western Baghdad. Mr. Fox had been tortured, handcuffed and shot, the police said.

Here we have a multinational military force made up of an unknown number of soldiers risking their lives to rescue the hostages. The hostages had been captured four months ago. One of the hostages, the lone American, had been tortured, handcuffed, shot, and wrapped in plastic and dumped on a trash pile.

So what did these hostages, members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams (based out of that liberal bastion called Chicago), have to say after their release?

Harmeet, Jim and Norman and Tom were in Iraq to learn of the struggles facing the people in that country. They went, motivated by a passion for justice and peace to live out a nonviolent alternative in a nation wracked by armed conflict.

They knew that their only protection was in the power of the love of God and of their Iraqi and international co-workers.

We believe that the illegal occupation of Iraq by Multinational Forces is the root cause of the insecurity which led to this kidnapping and so much pain and suffering in Iraq. The occupation must end.

Huh? Those brave soldiers risked their own lives and their safety to rescue them, and they are referred to simply as “illegal occupiers”? You’ve got to be kidding me.

Now put yourself in their place. You are a peace activist (actually, a more accurate description for this group would be ‘pacifist’). You risk life and limb by going to a war-torn country where there is a lot of violence. You get captured by Islamic terrorists. One of your colleagues is killed. Chances are, you’re next. But wait … you get rescued. The Brits and the Americans swoop down and deliver you to safety. Just how grateful would you be? Just how grateful would the average human be? And now compare how grateful these people were.

But it gets worse:

Today, in the face of this joyful news, our faith compels us to love our enemies even when they have committed acts which caused great hardship to our friends and sorrow to their families.

In the spirit of the prophetic nonviolence that motivated Jim, Norman, Harmeet and Tom to go to Iraq, we refuse to yield to a spirit of vengeance.

So they love those that captured them and have been threatening to kill them, but their only reference, somewhat vengeful, to their liberators were “illegal occupiers”?

The rest of their “statement” blathered on about how the evil US was detaining innocent Iraqi civilians and destroying an otherwise peaceful country. Bot not one other word was said about those soldiers that rescued them. Not a “thank you” or a “God bless you”.

Finally after being criticized for not recognizing their rescuers, they updated their website to give the soldiers a quick thanks: “We are grateful to the soldiers who risked their lives to free Jim, Norman and Harmeet.”. I guess they heard about the blogosphere picking up on their initial statement.

I say that the soldiers ought to take them back to where they found them and let them go. If they love their kidnappers so much then they shouldn’t mind spending the rest of their days, no matter how few of them there may be, living with them. If they’re so unhappy with the way we’re doing things, let them deal with the problem.

Says Neal Boortz: “What we need here is a little truth-in-labeling. These aren’t peace activists. They’re terrorist-appeasing pacifists. ”

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