Did Our Minutemen et al. Torture? Are Terrorists "Freedom Fighters?"

The ongoing efforts by Dick Durban, Howard Dean, and other leaders of the left to attack not just the President, but America's history and role in the world, has a long pedigree. But one needn't recount the silly '60s this morning in order to find stories of hostility toward the civic virtues that make liberty possible. Just remember the run-up to last year's election, and its aftermath, when the left tried to convince us not only that America is a malign force on the world stage, but that terrorists in Iraq are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.

Remember these words by Michael Moore?

The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not "insurgents" or "terrorists" or "The Enemy." They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow -- and they will win.

And this kind of drivel from the left?

The issues are the right to resist an invader and who should pay damages caused by illegal aggression!

I'm talking about resisting aggression. In all the world it is the right, often even the expressed duty, for every citizen to resist foreign aggression and occupation. In the old Swedish telephone directories it said under the headline "If the War comes" that "Any meassage [sic] that declares that resistance should end is false!" the idea being that if an aggressor knew in advance that the cost for occupation would be high, he would desist. Those who resist the aggressor, everywhere, are seen as legitimate freedom-fighters doing their patriotic duty. Not so in Iraq under American occupation!

Or Chris Matthews's apologia for murder?

Well, let me ask you about this. If this were the other side, and we were watching an enemy soldier, a rival—I mean, they‘re not bad guys, especially—just people that disagree with it. They‘re in fact the insurgents fighting us in their country.

I was reminded of that this morning because of this superb story on the front page of today's New York Times. Kudos to the Times for getting the story, and for placing it above the fold. It tells of an illiterate Iraqi named Ahmed Isa Fathil, 19 years old, who joined the new Iraqi Army, but quit nine months ago because its members are targeted for torture and murder.

Here's what the thugs hailed by Matthews, Moore, and their asinine supporters as "freedom fighters" and "minutemen" and "not bad guys" did:

This is Mr. Fathil's account of his ordeal.

He was having a lunch of lettuce and cucumbers in the kitchen of his home in the small desert village of Rabot with his mother and brother. An Opel sedan pulled up. Two men in masks carrying machine guns got out, seized him, and, leaving his mother sobbing, put him in the trunk of their car.

The drove to the house here. They taped his face, put cotton in his ears, and began to beat him.

The only possible explanation for the seizure he could think of was his time in the new Iraqi Army. Unemployed and illiterate, Mr. Fathil signed up after the American occupation began.

But nine months ago, when continuing working meant risking the wrath of the Jihadists, he quit. In all, 10 friends from his unit have been killed, he said. So have his uncle and his uncle's son, though neither ever worked as soldiers.

The men tended to talk in whispers, he said, telling him five times a day, in low voices in his ear, to pray, and offering him sand, instead of water, to wash himself. Just once, he asked if he could see his mother, and one of them said to him, "You won't leave until you are dead."

And:

When marines burst in, one of the captives was lying under a stairwell, badly beaten. At first, they thought he was dead.

The others were emaciated and battered. Mr. Fathil had fared the best. The other three were taken by medical helicopter to Balad, a base near Baghdad with a hospital.

But he still had been hurt badly. Marks from beatings criss-crossed his back, and deep pocks, apparently from electric shock burns, were gouged in his skin.

The shocks, he said, felt "like my soul is being ripped out of my body." But when he would start to scream, and his body would pull up from the shock, they would begin to beat him, he said.

Mr. Fathil has been at the Marine base south of Qaim since his release, on Saturday around noon. His mother still does not know he is alive.

When she was mentioned, he bowed and lowered his head, and began to cry softly, wiping his face with the jumpsuit given him by the marines.

He asked a reporter for help to move to another town, because it was too dangerous for his family to remain in their house. He begged not to have a photograph taken, even of the scars on his back. The captors took pictures of that, he said.

His town has always been a good place, he said, but the militants have made it hell.

"These few are destroying it," he said, his face streaked with tears. "Everybody they take, they kill. It's on a daily basis pretty much."

These are the animals the left lauds. And why not? After all, from the Weathermen to the Black Panthers, and from Leonard Bernstein to Michael Moore (not that their gene pools are identical), violence has been employed and praised by such Americans for a generation. It had it parallel on the old right, with the KKK, but there's a significant difference: the right today has repudiated its old thugs and the mad pseudo-intellectuals, such as the John Birchers, who supported them. The left, however, continues its embrace of violence, even when American servicemen and women are its victims. And that doesn't even take into account such men as Ahmed Isa Fathil or the thousands of Iraqis who did not survive the beatings, burnings, and bombs.

Dick Durban and his crew are not simply unpatriotic; they aren't merely engaged in a hideous effort to gain politically from bloodshed and violence. They're moral idiots, incapable of distinguishing good from evil, and willing to verbally assault our armed forces, even as they praise actions that, if implemented here, would destroy our freedoms. As we react to the left's ongoing efforts to undermine the credibility of America at home and abroad, don't forget that these remarks, both in the context of the war in Iraq and before it, have a long and undistinguished pedigree. And let's ensure that it's the moral relativism of the left that, in the end, undermines itself.