Half baked hostages

Melanie Phillips:

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The freed British hostage Norman Kember is returning to Britain to a swelling chorus of dismay that the hostages and their backers in the Christian Peacemaker Teams have ungratefully refused to thank the soldiers who freed them. (Update: Recognising the looming PR disaster, there now seems to have been a belated and half-hearted attempt to thank the soldiers involved in the rescue.) The word ‘ungrateful’ is what might be called typical British understatement – or more to the point, in these morally upside-down days, further graphic evidence of the state of denial that is the current default position in British public discourse over Iraq. For the language being used to describe these people distorts and sanitises what they are doing. They are referred to as ‘pacifists’. But what they are actually doing is campaigning against coalition forces in Iraq and aiding the enemy in doing so. The CPT website claims that they challenge ‘the injustices of the occupation’ and work ‘for the human rights of Iraqi detainees’. Strangely, however, they issue not a word of challenge to the murderous injustices of those engaged in the terrorist war against the coalition and the murderous injustices of those Sunnis who are trying to murder as many Shia as possible. Despite preying upon the feelings of all Iraqis of whatever denomination who simply want the violence to stop, they are therefore not in fact working for the human rights of the Shia who are thus being murdered, merely for the ‘human rights’ of those Iraqis who are trying to murder them.

Similarly on the West Bank they ‘document the harassment suffered by villagers at the hands of solders and settlers’ because of Israel’s security barrier – but fail conspicuously to document the campaign of mass murder by those West Bank inhabitants which made the security barrier necessary in the first place. Now we learn from the Telegraph that the released hostages refused to co-operate with their intelligence debriefers. They boast of ‘getting in the way’ in these terrible conflicts – but what they are getting in the way of is the defence of life and liberty against terrorist mass murder. In other words, far from being neutral humanitarian campaigners they are taking sides – the wrong side, the side of terrorist murder over life and liberty, the side of injustice over justice, of lies over truth, of wrong over right and of darkness over light.

These people are not pacifist or peace activist, they are advocates for enemy victimization. They are advocates of moral inversion. When it comes to criticizing the war and its conduct they only criticize our half of the conflict. Their group should be barred from entering Iraq again. Not so much because of their misguided nonsense, but becuase they endanger the good guys who have to go rescue them form the bad guys. At a minimum in the future no effort should be made to rescue them again.