Virgina Tech versus Iraq

The always interesting and informative Diogenes Lamp highlights a letter to the socialist rag, The Age (Australian equivalent of The Guardian), which beautifully demolishes the ridiculous comparisons the Left are making between the Virginia Tech tragedy and what's going on in Iraq in a post called Age sensible letter of the week. Here's the full post:

And a superb letter it is. The Age has attracted a number of letters comparing the death toll of the Virginia Tech shootings with deaths in Iraq. The Left do their utmost to try to put it over that it is the United States that is killing all these people in Iraq. That the killing is being done by fanatical, psychopathic Muslims is carefully never mentioned. The United States is trying to STOP the mayhem.

In this letter Bruce M. Stillman describes the situation in Iraq perfectly. The United States is the police, trying to bring order out of chaos.

A PARALLEL could be drawn between the tragedy in Iraq and the tragedy in Virginia. But only if the students had attacked the police when they arrived on the university campus to apprehend the deranged murderer and then proceeded to form into groups and attack each other.

These attacks would have been carried out in the most barbaric fashion possible, and would have targeted those students and staff who did not wish to join in the general mayhem and/or who assisted the police.

Meanwhile, the staff would have split and taken sides with whichever faculty they favoured and then provided at least tacit support for their chosen student groups, while at the same time indulging in intrigue and personal enrichment.

An endless succession of pointless meetings and discussions would have taken place at which time the main topic of conversation would be to do with the activity of the police along with calls for them to leave the campus ASAP. All this would have been exacerbated by staff and students at neighbouring universities sending weapons to selected faculties on the increasingly chaotic campus.

The non-university population, meanwhile, would blame the police, arguing that they should have stayed away from the university and left control of the situation to the staff and students presently dismembering each other. After all, it was the police intervention that converted them to cold-blooded barbarians. Otherwise they would have been nice, civilised, caring human beings.
Bruce M. Stillman, Fitzroy North

Let’s get this straight: the United States overthrew a barbaric totalitarian mass murderer, who had overseen the murder of hundreds of thousands, and very likely millions, of people.

America knew that Saddam’s dethronement would lead to chaos. But nobody could have predicted the lunacy of Islamicists using Iraq to conduct an insane religious war, and even using their own children as human bombs.

And nobody did. The Democrats in the last five and a half years have not offered one suggestion of how the war against Islamic terrorism should be fought (and it must be fought. If September 11 2001 was not a horrific act of war, then neither was the Nazi invasion of Poland, nor the attack on Pearl Harbour).

Our own whingers have done no better. Phillip Adams complains about the war in Iraq, but regarding what is to be done in response to the 2001 terrorist attack, or the 2002 Bali bombing, or the 2005 bombing of the London tube, or a thousand other acts committed by bloodthirsty Islamic fanatics, Adams and his ilk have nothing to offer.

One is reminded of the words of Cicero:

I criticise by creation, not by finding fault.

Anyway, thank you Bruce. That was one hell of a letter.

And thank you, Diogenes, for bringing that insightful letter to people's attention. A large number of people on the Left started making Iraq comparisons with unseemly haste in a horrible display of partisan politics. While that behaviour is not the sole domain of the Left at least the Right knows they're wrong when they do it.