As the anti-war protests in New York begin to turn ugly, there's a UPI story that's creating alot of chatter. A group of would-be human shields had fled Iraq and entered Jordan with videotaped interviews with Iraqis. One Iraqi mentioned that just as the American came to Iraq willing to die for peace, he was willing to die for his freedom. This is the operative paragraph:
"A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip "had shocked me back to reality." Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera "told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn't start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam's bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which had not been seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head."
As an example of "before and after"; I was just watching a news report where a protester in New York was being interviewed by a reporter:
reporter: So you agree that Saddam must go?
protester: Oh, yes!
reporter: But, you think it should be done in a way other than by war?
protester: Exactly!
reporter: All right, then; how?
protester: Uuuuuuummmmmm.........
...at which time she gazed off into the distance while searching her mind for an answer and finding only tumbleweeds blowing down the ghost town of her depth of understanding.
In terms of most protesters and human shields, I believe she represents the "before", and Kenneth Joseph is the "after".
But, the organizers of the protests, the hardcore anarcho-socialists, don't suffer from such moments of unclarity. They would probably read the above UPI excerpt and dismiss the Iraqis' desire for liberation as a product of their being so consumed by the immediate terror of Saddam that they have no time to consider the higher abstract concepts of agenda-laced anti-Americanism. (And, anarcho-socialism is not merely anti-Bush, it's politically anti-democracy, economically anti-lassez-faire, wholly anti-American.)
Posted by Tuning Spork at March 22, 2003 06:45 PM