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Joan Chittister at The National Catholic Reporter –
What the rest of the world watched on Inauguration Day – while
Americans’ were listening to Bushnev extol “freed’m”, Europeans (and
those of us who get our news on the web) were looking at the picture
below (image
from Warblogging). [smith2004]
bq.
Dublin, on U.S. Inauguration Day, didn’t seem to notice. Oh, they
played a few clips that night of the American president saying, “The
survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of
liberty in other lands.”
But that was not their lead story.
The picture on the front page of The Irish Times was a large
four-color picture of a small Iraqi girl. Her little body was a coil
of steel. She sat knees up, cowering, screaming madly into the dark
night. Her white clothes and spread hands and small tight face were
blood-spattered. The blood was the blood of her father and mother,
shot through the car window in Tal Afar by American soldiers while she
sat beside her parents in the car, her four brothers and sisters in
the back seat.
A series of pictures of the incident played on the inside page, as
well. A 12-year-old brother, wounded in the fray, falls face down out
of the car when the car door opens, the pictures show. In another, a
soldier decked out in battle gear, holds a large automatic weapon on
the four children, all potential enemies, all possible suicide
bombers, apparently, as they cling traumatized to one another in the
back seat and the child on the ground goes on screaming in her
parent’s blood.
No promise of “freedom” rings in the cutline on this picture. No joy
of liberty underlies the terror on these faces here.
…
There are about 25 million people in Iraq. Over half of them are under
the age of 15. Of the over 100,000 civilians dead in this war, then,
over half of them are children. We are killing children. The children
are our enemy. And we are defeating them.
“I’ll tell you why I voted for George Bush,” a friend of mine said. “I
voted for George Bush because he had the courage to do what Al Gore
and John Kerry would never have done.”
I’ve been thinking about that one.
Osama Bin Laden is still alive. Sadam Hussein is still alive. Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi is still alive. Baghdad, Mosul and Fallujah are
burning. But my government has the courage to kill children or their
parents. And I’m supposed to be impressed.
[End the War on Freedom]