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Church of England demonstrates a lack of moral backbone

Melanie Phillips:

Is there no limit to the abjectness of the Church of England’s response to Islamic terror? A working group of bishops led by the Bishop of Oxford Richard Harries has suggested that western Christians should apologise for the Iraq war. The moral stupidity of this is hard to believe, even by the standards of the CofE. Yes, terrible mistakes have been made by the coalition which have contributed to the appalling violence in Iraq which continues. But apologise -- for what, precisely? For getting rid of Saddam Hussein who subjugated his people and subjected them to unspeakable barbarity? For enabling the Iraqis to taste democracy and freedom for the first time? And apologise to whom exactly? To the Ba’athists, perhaps, who subjected the rest of the population to a regime of unmitigated horror and towards whom the church – by this logic – feels badly that they have been deprived of power?

The Times packs one idiotic argument by these bishops after another into one short news story. First, they want to apologise not for something they have done but for something the government has done....

The enemy the C of E wants to apoligize to was recently described by Colonel H.R. McMaster who had just chased them from Tal Afar:

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So the enemy moved into here to establish this support base and safe haven. They also moved into this area because there's very dense urban terrain in the city of Tall Afar. It's difficult for our forces, organized as we are as a mechanized force, primarily, to access these areas. And so the enemy went into this safe haven and used it not only to access sources of external support, but they also used this area to train, organize, and equip their forces for employment not only locally here in Tall Afar, but without (sic) the region and potentially throughout the country. So it was very important for us to deny the enemy the ability to use this safe haven and to terrorize this population.

To protect themselves here, what the enemy did is they waged the most brutal and murderous campaign against the people of Tall Afar.

I'd like just to briefly characterize the enemy, describe who we're fighting here. This is an enemy, who when they came in, they removed all the imams from the mosques, and they replaced them with Islamic extremist laymen. They removed all the teachers from the schools and replaced them with people who had a fifth-grade education and who preached hatred and intolerance. They murdered people. In each of their cells that they have within the city has a direct action cell of about 100 or so fighters. They have a kidnapping and murder cell; they have a propaganda cell, a mortar cell, a sniper cell -- a very high degree of organization here. And what the enemy did is to keep the population from performing other activities. To keep the population afraid, they kidnapped and murdered large numbers of the people here, and it was across the spectrum. A Sunni Turkmen imam was kidnapped and murdered. A very fine man, a city councilman, Councilman Suliman (sp), was pulled out of his car in front of his children and his wife and gunned down with about 30 gunshot wounds to his head. The enemy conducted indiscriminate mortar attacks against populated areas and wounded scores of children and killed many others. The enemy here did just the most horrible things you can imagine, in one case murdering a child, placing a booby trap within the child's body and waiting for the parent to come recover the body of their child and exploding it to kill the parents. Beheadings and so forth.

So the enemy's grip over this population to maintain the safe haven was based on fear, coercion, and these sort of heinous acts. And not only were they targeting civilians, brutally murdering them, torturing them, but they were also kidnapping the youth of the city and brainwashing them and trying to turn them into hate-filled murderers.

So, really, there could be no better enemy for our soldiers and Iraqi army soldiers to pursue and defeat and deny the enemy the safe haven in this area.

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What kind of moral bankrupt wants to apologize to these animals? Where do they find this need to apoligize to people who would be condemned by any fair reading of the Bible? Why are they taking the side of people who would behead everyone of them if given the opportunity?