Posted on 11/21/2003 3:22:10 PM PST by albertabound
Moral blindness blights anti-Bush protesters
By MARCUS GEE Friday, November 21, 2003 - Page A17
The smoke was still rising from two bombing attacks in Istanbul yesterday when tens of thousands of anti-war protesters took to the streets of London. As dazed, bleeding Turks stumbled away from the wreckage, the protesters waved placards and chanted slogans about terrorism.
But don't get them wrong. The protesters didn't come to denounce the killers of Istanbul. That's not the war they're worried about. No, they came to denounce the man whose country is leading the counterattack, the world's "number one terrorist," U.S. President George W. Bush.
Have these people no shame? Have they lost all sense of right and wrong?
Holding an anti-war march now is like protesting the fight against Nazism at the height of the Blitz. The world is at war, and the enemy is just as ruthless. In the past few weeks, we have seen attacks on synagogues in Turkey, expatriate families in Saudi Arabia, Italian police in Iraq -- even the International Red Cross in Iraq. Scores of innocent people have been killed and maimed: women and children, young and old, Muslims and Jews. No one knows who will be next.
Yet, none of this seems to have made the slightest impression on the anti-war crowd. There were no mass marches against anti-Semitic violence when the synagogue bombs went off. No crowds gathered to condemn the murder of the poor Italians, who are in Iraq solely to help Iraqis put their country back together. Instead, the protesters direct their anger exclusively at the "imperialist," "colonialist," "militaristic" Americans and their British allies in the war on terrorism. "Blair, Bush: Butchers," said a typical placard at yesterday's march.
This sort of thing has become so common since Sept. 11, 2001, that we have almost lost sight of how perverse it is. Whatever anyone may think of the United States, its war on Iraq, or its prison in Guantanamo Bay, to equate George Bush with the killers of Istanbul is to demonstrate the worst kind of moral blindness.
You need to be blind not to see which side is the right one in this struggle. On one side, stand the United States and its fellow democracies, with all their faults. On the other, stands al-Qaeda, a fanatical terrorist movement that would deliver the Middle East to a medieval form of Islamic rule.
It is a woman-hating movement that treats women as chattel. It is an anti-Semitic movement that would "cleanse" the region of Jews. It is a homophobic movement that considers homosexuality a capital crime.
It is an anti-democratic movement that would rule through the word of the Koran and never hold a vote.
In short, it is a movement that would wipe out everything London's protesters hold dear.
Many feminists marched through London's streets yesterday. Their blindness is so deep that they marched against the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, a movement that forbade women to work, and girls to go to school. Many environmentalists marched, too. Their blindness is so deep that they opposed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, a man who drained the fertile marshes of southern Iraq to drive out the Marsh Arabs, and who fouled the Persian Gulf with oil in the 1991 gulf war.
Human-rights activists were out by the thousands yesterday. What do they have so say about the hundreds of mass graves uncovered in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion, each filled with the remains of Mr. Hussein's victims -- perhaps 300,000 of them in all?
This is what they have to say: "Stop Bush." That was the vapid slogan of yesterday's march.
Stop him from doing what? If the anti-war crowd had stopped Mr. Bush from going after al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, the Taliban would still be in power and women would still be walled up in their homes. If the anti-war movement had stopped him from invading Iraq, the Hussein regime would still be in power and the mass graves would still be filling up with corpses.
Mr. Bush didn't listen, thank goodness, and both the Taliban and the Hussein regime are gone as a result.
So now, the protesters want to "Stop Bush" from occupying Iraq. We all know what the result of that would be. If the Americans leave Iraq now, while they are under attack and Iraqis are still preparing for self-rule, the bombers and the insurgents will claim a victory that would inspire terrorists the world over.
Iraq itself would fall into chaos, causing misery for its people and endless trouble for its neighbours. Is this what the protesters want?
Yesterday was Nov. 20, 2003. Remember it. On that day, terrorists in Istanbul killed at least 27 people and injured more than 400. On that same day, tens of thousands of cheerful protesters marched through the streets of London calling "Stop Bush."
Have they no shame?
mgee@globeandmail.ca
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I don't think it's blindness, but rather ignorance.
These are the children of parents who sent them to public schools.
No, they don't. They also don't have morals, souls, principles, convictions, or integrity. They are worthless people who contribute nothing to society, except its further decay. They care not one whit about what the Iraq people, the victims of 9-11, nor the recent victims have suffered because it doesn't affect their own miserable lives. It is always easy to support a dictator when you don't live in his country.
Susan Sarandon fears she let friends and family down at this year's Oscar ceremony by refusing to make a strong anti-war statement. The actress and partner Tim Robbins were both blasted for waving the peace sign at cameras as they arrived at the star-studded bash, but Sarandon insists it wasn't enough. The movie star, who enraged Academy bosses in 1993 by using her presenting role to speak out about Hiv-infected Haitian refugees who were being detained by the American government, now wishes she had been more vocal at this year's ceremony. She says, "I feel that I failed at the Oscars this year - the ceremony was so discouraging. I had all these different peace buttons, but people were terrified of wearing them. One person, who shall remain nameless, said, 'It doesn't really go with my necklace.' I just kept thinking, 'I've been so outspoken at marches and on TV, what am I going to say that's new?' A lot of people expected me to do something outrageous."
For these people, the war on terror is not about their respective 'causes'. It's about playing politics. Every one of these fools have been and will be silent when a Democrat is in the White House.
What did we hear from the 'feminists' when Bill abused his office to get a hummer? Not a peep. How about the rights of Afghan women under the Taliban? "Well, that's bad and all, but BUSH IS MUCH WORSE!!!"
What did we hear from the 'human-rights' groups when Bill tossed a few Tomahawks into an empty tent? How about when he went to war against Milosevic? Very little; not nearly as much as we are hearing from them now.
What do the enviro-weenies have to say about anything other than drilling in Alaska? Nothing at all about drained marshes in Iraq.
I would daresay that a good majority of these people are pretenders. They only care about their 'causes' when it gives them an opportunity to attack a conservative.
This is a great point. And let's not fool ourselves for a second by believing these events weren't coordinated on some level. It would be foolish to believe that the enemies of Western Civ. that were on parade in Trafalgar Square do not include terrorist sympathizers and a few thousand 'would-be' "Johnny Walker's"
Atos
"Why is it that whenever the liberals are outraged, there are thousands of protesters, but whenever the conservatives are outraged, we see one or two people with 'Young Republicans' signs?"
I shrugged. "We have jobs."
It's a little of both, but it wouldn't matter because I don't think anything with these "protestors" of today is really about issues.
What they are is a generation of spoiled wannabe's. More than anything else they're just ticked off that they were born too late to grow up in the sixties. Most have a shallow understanding, if any, of real-world politics and they have the trained seven-minute attention span of children raised on television.
That, and they're there to get chicks.
Absolutely! Well said, Usul.
Atos
Isn't it interesting how we don't see any of these protestors, or human shields, in Iraq, helping those people, that they claim to be so worried about, rebuild their nation?
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