What message are the Brits trying to send

Jack Kelly:

Patricia Hewitt, health secretary in Tony Blair's Cabinet, was upset by pictures broadcast from Iran of the 15 captive British sailors and marines, reported Christopher Booker of the Sunday Telegraph.

"It was deplorable that the woman hostage should be shown smoking," Ms. Hewitt said. "This sends completely the wrong message to our young people."

When liberals cower when petty thugs make threats (which is pretty much whenever petty thugs make threats), conservatives, understandably, suspect them of cowardice. But Ms. Hewitt's bizarre response to her country's humiliation suggest something else is at work.

The most remarkable aspect of this most recent Iranian hostage crisis is the lengths to which so many prominent people in the West have gone to make excuses for inexcusable Iranian behavior.

Patrick Cockburn, writing in The Independent, said the crisis was America's fault because the U.S. military had captured six suspected Iranian intelligence officers in a raid in northern Iraq on Jan. 11.

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"The abortive Erbil raid provided a dangerous escalation in the confrontation between the U.S. and Iran which ultimately led to the capture of 15 British sailors and marines," Mr. Cockburn said.

"According to this version of events," said Kenneth Timmerman, a journalist who writes frequently about Iran, "if the United States and Britain would just allow Iran to run roughshod over Iraq, supply terrorists with weapons and suitcases of cash, everything would be just fine,"

Some liken liberal appeasers to those Britons who wanted to make a deal with Hitler after the fall of France in 1940. That's unfair to those appeasers. Their attitude was not honorable, but it was reasonable. The Nazis then possessed a substantial advantage in military power. Today's liberal appeasers embrace dhimmitude even though it's the West that has a huge military and economic advantage.

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Liberals are not so much terrified by the threat radical Islam poses as they are oblivious to it. A recent poll indicated a majority of Democrats are more worried about global warming than Islamic terror. While many liberals do indeed need to have backbones surgically implanted, more need to have their heads examined.

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Or their hearts. Liberalism looks to emotions and empathy for its logic. Kelly has some brilliant observations, but it will be the rare liberal who will engage his brain in comprehending what he said.