Jacob Laksin in FrontPage on “the extent to which the radical Left has become a willing agent” of jihadist terror.
In an op-ed for the Fort-Worth Star-Telegram, radical leftist Robert Jensen and journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, calls on Americans to pursue “the most courageous act of citizenship in the United States today: pledging to dismantle the American empire.” Jensen insists, “The United States has lost the war in Iraq, and that’s a good thing.” With Professor Jensen, leftist stalwart pundits and publications””including The Nation, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Howard Zinn””have abandoned pacifism in favor of rooting for America’s terrorist (“insurgent”) enemies in Iraq.
To witness the extent to which the radical Left has become a willing agent of Islamist terror, it is sufficient to tour some of its more unhinged tribunes. For instance, over at The Nation, that bastion of bourgeois leftism, you”ll find no mention of our armed forces” recent string of victories against Islamist die-hards. Instead, from the magazine that maintained a studied silence concerning the cruelties of Saddam Hussein, comes now much hair pulling about the supposed human rights abuses visited on Iraqi “civilians” by American troops.
Even as Marines were clearing Fallujah of its terrorist population, the Nation’s Miles Schuman, of the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture, was bemoaning the operation and calling for “an end to assaults on Falluja’s civilian population.” Apparently untroubled by the actual terrorist assaults on the Iraq’s civilian population, a reign of terror that found its most ghoulish expression in the 20 torture sites discovered in the course of the military offensive, Schuman set about the task of smearing the troops” efforts as war crimes. As evidence, he adduced a BBC report that U.S. air strikes had leveled a hospital in Fallujah.
Absent from Schuman’s article was any mention of the hospital’s history. By no means a neutral shelter for the city”s sick, the hospital had been operated by an Islamist Saudi charity. Last spring, it had been the source of trumped-up casualty reports about civilian casualties. Military reports further registered that the hospital had been converted it into a headquarters for insurgent fighters. Moreover, contrary to Schuman’s claims that U.S. forces had destroyed the hospital with no regard for civilians, not even the BBC”s determined reporters could find any indication of even a single death. Rather than grappling with the available facts, however, Schuman gave free reign to his febrile imagination. Intent on making up with outrage what he lacked in evidence, Schuman wrote, “The bombing of hospitalized patients, forced starvation and dehydration, denial of medicines and health services to the sick and wounded must be recognized for what they are: war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
Read it all.