February 01, 2006

Eric Alterman: Bush = Jill Carroll Hostage Takers

Is Eric Alterman dumb or just evil? To equivocate between U.S. forces detaining women who have ties to terrorists and terrorists who kidnap, hold hostage, and threaten to murder civilians is dumb and evil, so I guess the answer is both.

Such equivocation minimizes the barbarity of hostage taking. Further, it gives aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States who fight us because they actually believe such equivocations are true. Next time bin Laden delivers an audio tape to al Jazeera, I fully expect him to quote Eric Alterman.

Eric Alterman:

I’d like to congratulate the Bush administration for having the good taste to not make too big a deal about the kidnapping of U.S. journalist Jill Carroll by Iraqi insurgents. Since the Bush administration is in the business of politically kidnapping innocent people too, including the wives of people it wants to surrender. I hate to say it because of the all the baggage it carries but it reminds me of the deliberate murder of the innocent Ethel Rosenberg, to try to get a confession out of her husband.

But that goes only to Alterman's stupidity. What about the evil accusation?

As regular readers know, I spend a good deal of my free time watching media produced by terrorists and reading what they say on bulletin boards. Alterman's accusations are identical to those made by jihadis all around the world. They justify the murdering of people like Jill Carroll as simple tit-for-tat.

The Americans murder Iraqi women, therefore murdering American women is justified.

They actually believe this. Why would they not? Their media tells them so. They even have images of crying women making the same accusations. It only makes matters worse that the American Left also seems to enjoy believing the most outrageous accusations made against the U.S.

So, we should not be surprised that when terrorists in Iraq cut off the head of an American civilian that they first dress him up in the orange jumpsuits so familiar from picturs of Abu Ghraib. They justify their actions because they equivocate the abuse at Abu Ghraib with torture and murder.

Just as Eric Alterman equivocates detaining security threats who happen to be women with the kidnapping of civilians.

The views of the people holding Jill Carroll hostage are shaped by the outrageous lies of the Arab, Islamist, and Western Leftist media. For nearly two years now, with every single female hostage that has been taken there has been a demand that all female Iraqi prisoners must be released from prison. These demands came long before Jill Carroll was taken hostage because these media outlets made outlandish accusations that thousands of Iraq women were in prison, being tortured, raped, forced to watch as American soldiers sadistically killed their small children, and murdered.

All of which are lies, and all of which outlets such as the one cited by the ignoramous Eric Alterman--al Jazeera.com--have been running for years.

So, when the U.S. military admits that it occassionally detains women for questioning in a country that has more than its fair share of female suicide bombers, how exactly are we to come to the conclusion that we are guilty of hostage taking? Even when these women are only detained for questioning because their husbands are terrorists, such equivocation is unfounded. The wives of criminals are routinely questioned in the United States, even in peacetime. And charging the loved ones of a criminal is routinely done in the U.S. as leverage against the real target of the criminal investigation--the husbands.

Under war conditions is it surprising that we might need to detain the wife of a terrorist who may know the time and location of the next bombing of a cafe that her husband is planning? That soldiers might occasionally overstep the normal bounds of detention if they think that holding a woman might lead to the arrest of the kind of man that beheads hostages? That the same procedural rules that apply in Chicago don't necessarily apply in Baghdad?

It takes a sick, demented, and perverted mind to come to the conclusion that American soldiers are engaged in the same activities as Islmic terrorists. Eric Alterman has such a mind.

More at Newsbusters who have a similar disdain of Alterman.