Hostages released ...

Jill Carroll released ...
Charles Adler on Hostage releases

In recent days, two seperate high profile hostage incidents from Iraq have been resolved, with hostages being found alive and well for the most part. Charles Adler used the release of 2 Canadians and a Brit (sadly, Tom Fox, the American, was killed in an escape attempt) to rail against the homosexuality of one of the Canadian hostages and twist that into a reason why he should never have been allowed to protest a bloody war being fought in the wrong place.

Adler took the opportunity also to criticize the Christian Peacemaker Teams group that sponsered Loney and the others, pulling a statement they made after 9/11 and twisting their words against them.

It was also on the day after Sept. 11, 2001, that CPT shared the following on its website: "Our most realistic hope for safety comes from working to make sure that everyone in the world community is treated fairly and being just as willing to give our lives in pursuit of loving the enemy as the terrorists were willing to give their lives to kill the enemy."

The enemy? Which one of the more than 3,000 victims (many of them Canadian) of Sept. 11 are Christian Peacemakers calling the enemy?

The Christian Peacemakers weren't saying anyone in the Towers was their enemy, and any rational reading of the quote makes that clear. They were making a nuanced statement about how the men who flew those planes into the buildings were thinking, men who were CLEARLY committed to their cause in a very specific and life changing way. Thats not to make them out to be anything but the cold blooded killers they are, but the CPT statement is NOT trying say the people killed by those terrorists were CPT's enemy, or our enemy. The statement says the people in the towers were the enemy of the men who were piloting those planes, and if Adler wants to ignore that fact, he does so at his own ignorance and peril, IMO. Unfortunately, he and his ilk do so at my peril as well.

Today, Jill Carroll was released, unharmed after months of captivity. While her full story is yet to emerge, one general truth seems to be abundantly clear ... the image of the insurgency in Iraq as blood-thirsty tyrants bent only on desctruction of innocent life is the big lie. If the people who took Jill Carroll hostage were crazed lunatics, bent on killing and terrorizing as many innocent people as possible, Jill Carroll would be dead. So would Loney and the rest of the CPT team. They'd ALL have been dead months ago, and videos of their beheadings would have showed up on CNN and al-Jazeera.

But instead, we have 4 people (out of 5 involved in the 2 abductions) alive and well, going on with their lives. We have to examine the reasons they are alive, while others are not ... putting it down to 'luck' is simply non-sensical ... there's no question that if the people holding either group felt their deaths would have advanced their causes, then we'd have 5 bodies on our hands, not 4 live people and an unfortunate guy killed escaping. If we continue to ignore facts like these, then we are doomed to a very dark and disturbing future, IMO.

There are ways out of the darkness, I think, but its not easy. The first is to start to intelligently examine why Jill Carroll, and Jim Loney and his friends, aren't corpses today. If we fail to ask that question, then I think the 'exit strategy' dissapears.