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February 19, 2003
‘Peace movement’ turns its back on Saddam’s
victims
The so-called peace movement
throughout the world and in the United States has fallen upon
hard times.
That was nowhere more evident than
in the antiwar protests staged over the past weekend in New
York, San Francisco, London and other cities in the United
States and abroad.
Let’s rephrase that
sentence: The protests staged were unmistakably anti-American,
filled with hate toward this country and its leaders.
President Bush was vilified in New York City as “The Unelected
Idiot,” “Bush the Baby Killer,” “Spoiled Fascist Cowboy” and
other unprintable slogans displayed on placards. According to
one observer at the New York protest, “In the speeches that
followed, this abhorrence of Bush was closely paralleled by a
vehement hatred directed against the United States; a belief
that our country has historically been, and continues to be,
uniquely evil; a conviction that America, more than any other
nation, threatens peace and justice on earth.”
Of course, it goes without saying that the demonstrators in
New York did not march on the Iraqi consulate to demand an end
to Saddam Hussein’s murderous dictatorship or condemn him in
speeches and on their placards.
Too bad they
didn’t listen to British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s speech on
Saturday. In spite of being pilloried by the antiwar left in
his own country, Blair said if he were to follow the antiwar
demonstrators’ advice, “there would be no war, but there would
still be Saddam. Many of the people marching will say they
hate Saddam. But the consequences of taking their advice is he
stays in charge in Iraq, ruling the Iraqi people ... There
will be no march for the victims of Saddam, no protests about
the thousands of children that die needlessly every year under
his rule, no righteous anger over the torture chamber which,
if he is left in power, will be left in
being.”
Blair has refused to be cowed by the
protests or by his deteriorating approval ratings in British
polls. He, like Bush, is behaving like a leader, like Winston
Churchill did when he warned his country and the world — to no
avail at the time — against appeasement of Hitler as the
German dictator began his aggression in Europe and developed
his own weapons of mass destruction.
Even the
liberal New York Times has had enough of the
hide-and-seek game Iraq is playing with United Nations
inspectors. In a Saturday editorial, the Times called
on the Security Council to “pass a new resolution that sets a
deadline for unconditional Iraqi compliance and authorizes
military action if Baghdad falls short ... The Security
Council doesn’t need to sit through more months of
inconclusive reports. It needs full and immediate Iraqi
disarmament. It needs to say so, backed by the threat of
military force.”
The radical left, which is
the primary sponsor of these hate fests, has chosen an
unlikely beneficiary of its crusades. By opposing war against
the Saddam regime, it turns its back on Iraqi exiles, Kurds
and Shiite Muslims who seek liberation from an oppressor. It
also ignores the 25 million Iraqis who suffer under Saddam,
and by doing so, loses any moral pretensions for its cause.
Instead of presenting a principled opposition
to war, the sponsors and participants in the weekend protests
spewed forth venomous and gratuitous insults against this
nation and its president, as though there is some moral
equivalence between the United States and the Iraqi
dictatorship.
Today’s “peace movement” is
sorely in need of adult supervison. Until then, its
hate-filled protests are beneath contempt.
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February 19, 2003 
