HOW HE SEES IT U.S. left stays mum as 'their people' targeted

By DEROY MURDOCK
SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
The muted reaction to this month's murder of Virginia-based peace activist Tom Fox highlights a puzzling phenomenon. While terrorists in Iraq -- like those who dumped Fox's bullet-ridden body beside a Baghdad railroad -- target the kinds of people the left champions in America, liberal Democrats stay mum while "their people" get seized, maimed, and killed over there. Rather than demand these butchers' total defeat, Operation Iraqi Freedom's shrillest opponents instead accuse President Bush of idiotically blundering into war while brilliantly manipulating Democrats into authorizing hostilities.
If terrorists in Iraq only iced bankers, oilmen, and HMO administrators, one might fathom liberal complacency about such violence. Instead, these murderers hit precisely those who leftists normally welcome into their rainbow-hued tent. But since these victims are in Iraq, their deaths generate little evident sympathy.
Beyond their indiscriminate killings, consider how terrorists deliberately strike groups liberals claim to love, at least domestically:
UPacifists: Though peaceniks in Iraq echo the American left's pronouncements, violence against them yields left-wing American quietude. Along with the late Tom Fox, terrorists last Nov. 26 kidnapped Briton Norman Kember, and Canadians James Loney and Harmeet Singh Sooden. These members of Christian Peacemaker Teams remain captive. Terrorists seem unimpressed that CPT personnel served as human shields to prevent Iraq's liberation.
UDiplomats: "Don't fight, talk" could encapsulate the left's foreign policy. Liberals usually favor diplomacy over confrontation; consider their craving for United Nations resolutions and lengthy negotiations. So where was the outrage when al Qaeda in Iraq killed Algerian diplomats Ali Belaroussi and Azzedine Belkadi late last July?
"These are two envoys of the Algerian state which does not apply Sharia law and is allied to the Jews and the Christians," charged the group's Web site.
As these militants explained, on July 7 they assassinated "the ambassador of the infidels," Ihab al-Sharif, Egypt's envoy. Their Web site said they hoped "to capture as many ambassadors as we can."
Terrorists also exterminated 22 people when they detonated a 550-pound truck bomb beside the United Nations' Baghdad headquarters on Aug. 22, 2003.
UJournalists: "Progressives" are generally cozy with reporters, and vice-versa. The mainstream media list leftward as effortlessly as marbles roll downhill. Yet, ongoing violence against journalists in Iraq elicits little left-wing comment.
Terrorists this month shot and killed Muhsin Khudhair, an Iraqi newsweekly editor. They fatally shot Iraqi TV anchorman Munsuf Abdallah al-Khaldi as he prepared to interview poets.
Terrorists kidnapped Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll last Jan. 7. She has appeared thrice on video, tearfully pleading for her life.
Last Nov. 18, terrorists struck Baghdad's Hamra Hotel, home to many journalists. A car bomb killed eight and injured 43. The toll might have been worse had a follow-on truck bomb not dropped into the first car bomb's crater.
UTeachers: Instructors compose the Democrats' chief battalion of political volunteers. In exchange, Democrats dutifully serve teachers' unions. How strange, then, that barely a ripple arose after terrorists last Sept. 26 drove to the Al-Jazeera Elementary School in Muelha. They lined up five teachers and their driver against a classroom wall and shot them dead.
UChildren: "Think of the children" may be the left's most shopworn slogan. Democrats claim to cherish kids sometimes more than their parents do. Yet liberals say little when terrorists aim their cross hairs at Iraqi boys and girls.
Last July 14, a homicide bomber steered toward candy-hungry kids who had surrounded U.S. GIs in Jadida. His car exploded, killing 27, including one American soldier and 18 children.
"Terrorists occupied and controlled the only hospital in the city," Mayor Najim Abdullah Abid al-Jibouri of Tal' Afar, Iraq, wrote in a letter praising U.S. GIs in the March 13 New York Post. These savages "stuffed the corpses of children with explosives and tossed them into the streets in order to kill grieving parents attempting to retrieve the bodies of their young."
Why have so many liberals abandoned overseas the very people they lionize at home? The answer is the worst four-letter word in their vocabulary: Bush.
The Democratic left hates Bush's guts. They also hate his face, his footsteps, and his shadow. Since hurting him involves looking away as terrorists slaughter pacifists, diplomats, journalists, teachers, and children, they do so with wild-eyed zeal.
X New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in Arlington, Va.