This story was covered by hundreds of posts yesterday. Yes she was a "bleeding heart liberal", but it seems that her bleeding heart was in the right place.
Let's don't be like the schmucks at DU. She may have been confused, but it appears she did what she did out of love and she paid the ultimate price.
God bless her and her family.
I was stating a fact! No matter who you are you don't go into a battle zone without the chance of being hurt.
What she did was undermine our war effort and help put our troops in evengreater danger.
Her exit from the scene is a blessing for those of us who have loved ones in Iraq who are doing the real humanitarian work - soldiering.
There are plenty of people in Iraq who are not conducting polls for Code Pink, or getting themselves profiled in Vanity f***ing Fair, or interrupting Secretary Rumsfeld in front of the cameras to grandstand, or getting the vile Senator Leahy, when he visited Baghdad, to hire them as his aide in Washington.
They are actually feeding the sick, nursing the wounded, teaching the ignorant. And you'll never see them in a featured Yahoo story.
She put OUR people (and I have a few nephews in Iraq) at risk---so in the end it comes out to "tough cookies" If she had been responsible for getting any of my nephews kille/wounded, you can be assured that I'd really be going off. She had NO RIGHT to be there no matter her where her hert may lie.
Play with fire and you can end up getting burned.
"This story was covered by hundreds of posts yesterday. Yes she was a "bleeding heart liberal", but it seems that her bleeding heart was in the right place."
Uh, not quite. she was in the wrong place in more ways than one. she never should have been in Iraq, not before the war as one of Saddam's 'human shields', and not as an agitator that was trying to highlight the U.S. mistakes afterwords. Her death by terrorism is ironic.
my take on it ...
http://freedomstruth.blogspot.com/
She was an American activist, of the type that was trying to show that American troops were causing terrible harm. In other words, negative PR to highlight the victims of 'war'. The leftwing site Common Dreams notes of the young activist: "A onetime protégée of one of the world's most visible activists, Global Exchange's Medea Benjamin, Ruzicka was set on this course after 9/11 when she went to Afghanistan on a campaign to help those in the line of fire between U. S. troops and suspected Taliban strongholds. ..."
Her previous activism included disrupting speeches ... "... just two years ago I was dragged out of the World Affairs Council when President Bush was speaking. It was his first trip to California, and I'd bought a ticket to hear him speak. I made my sarong-type skirt into a banner, and when he started his address, I unfurled it and jumped on a table and started shouting, 'Stop the rate caps now!' The cops grabbed me and took me out."
She changes her style but not her mission since then:
It was between her post-war sojourns to Afghanistan and Iraq that Ruzicka split amicably from Global Exchange to start her own organization, CIVIC (www.civicworldwide.org). Though there is the ongoing worry over money, Ruzicka is getting better at finding grants, and she was given a boost when ABC's "Nightline" aired a piece on her work in Iraq.
There is something noble in the American spirit that makes us take risks and do what we think is needed to change things for the better. But there is also something meddlesome, annoying, and arrogant about getting in the middle of a complex situation like a war zone, and doing freelance agitation and foreign policy; call it "ugly Americanism", call it "Jesse Jacksonism" or even "Jimmy Carterism".
Ruzicka's mission in Iraq was not to tally the victims of terrorism but to tally victims of 'war'. If you listen to the Leftists PR, war is a disembodied evil, disregarding the causes of it, the purposes, perpetrators, and complexities of it. This has been the cry of the 'peace' groups during the Cold War, ("peace" groups that were actually front groups for the Soviet Union). The Soviet Union is dead, the Cold War over, but the plea for 'peace' from the Leftists goes on, every time the U.S. is stirred by events to action.
Did this women ever, ever, prior to her death at the hands of terrorists, attend, organize or participate in a rally against terrorism? Or against Saddam Hussein's brutality?
But we know the answer. Before getting killed by terrorists, before she decided to go around polling Iraqis to find victims of collateral damage in war, before the invasion of Iraq itself, she was a 'human shield' to stop the overthrow of Saddam:
When the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq began in March 2003, Ruzicka was already in Baghdad with Code Pink, said Jodi Evans, co-founder of the women’s anti-war group.
Other activists decided to return to the United States to talk about how the Iraqi people were affected by the invasion, but Ruzicka made a commitment to stay, Evans said. She founded the group CIVIC that year.
“Marla thought she would be more effective staying, because once the bombs started falling, people would be hurt and she needed to help them get their lives back together,” Evans said.
Isn't it ironic? She has been protesting the very military that protects her freedom to do activist activities, and is now killed by the allies of the dictator she agitated to protect.
Amen to what you said. Some of the posts here are incredibly cold-blooded. I haven't seen any evidence that she was burning flags or actively working against American troops. Maybe she was a liberal but are people here really going to rejoice over an American girl being killed because she was a liberal? Sick It resembles the Palestinians dancing after 9/11.
I agree with you. Some people just can't recognize evil for what it is. Usually, they misidentify evil.
She wanted to do good, and worked to help others.