Ian Robinson in today’s Calgary Sun is appalled by the behavior of the three Canadian hostages free in Iraq last week, and it’s about time somebody, if you excuse the expression, struck out at it (bolds are mine):

Pacifist group revealed as moral imbeciles
By Ian Robinson

When the three Western hostages were rescued by coalition forces in Iraq last week and returned to Canada, was I the only one who was disappointed?

Was I the only one who thought: Dear Lord. Is THIS what all the fuss was about?

These smarmy, international busybodies, the Gladys Kravitzes of the Iraq occupation, peering out at the world from behind the curtains with their pursed little disapproving lips?

These sanctimonious, reality challenged little creeps?

And even after the release, the organization to which they’re attached was still taking metaphorical shots at the coalition of troops who rescued them.

“As peacemakers who hold firm to our commitment to non-violence, we are also deeply grateful that they fired no shots to free our colleagues,” their press release said.

What would the hostages have done if shots had been fired? Voluntarily returned to captivity?

If ever a group wasn’t worth the effort and risk to free them, it’s these guys.

….. A report out of Baghdad also indicated these self-involved, self-righteous morons declined to provide valuable intelligence about their kidnappers to the British, U.S. and Canadian soldiers who saved their lives!

See, members of Christian Peacemaker Teams are pacifists and they don’t co-operate with men with guns who might use the information to track down kidnappers and/or terrorists and shoot them in the head until they agree to stop kidnapping and/or terrorizing people.

Pacifists don’t believe in violence and refuse to use it or abet its use. Pacifists are therefore moral imbeciles.

They’re like the guy at the party who won’t kick in for the pizza but sneaks a slice when he thinks nobody’s looking.

Pacifists are the same.

They’re thieves who enjoy the protection offered by those they morally despise but aren’t willing to get their hands dirty themselves.

They walk down our safe Canadian streets, enjoying that safety.

Never mind the only reason our streets are safe is because criminals are hunted down by men and women called “police officers.”

….. We live in a civilized society — in which wimpy pacifist losers can walk around safely — because we live under constant threat of socially sanctioned government violence.

….. Pacifists ….. have never accomplished anything in this world and never will, and they’ve certainly never created what they purport to love: Peace.

They believe violence never solves anything when, in fact, the judicious use of violence solves many of the large problems.

South Korea is free because men — real men, not pacifists — sacrificed to stop the North Koreans from enslaving it. Ditto for Nazi and Japanese aggression during the Second World War. Violence ended black slavery on this continent.

All of those achievements were won by men with guns, not the wimps on the sidelines praying and feeling smug about occupying the moral high ground.

April 4 Update: A Schmidt campaign representative contacted me to say that “we were never part of the debate ……” This is corroborated by a Georgetown News Democrat story that quotes Schmidt campaign manager Allen Freeman as saying “We didn’t just back down. We never said ‘yes’ to begin with.” In the same article the McEwen campaign, as might be expected, disputes Freeman’s contention.
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The challenger’s name is Deborah Kraus.

Matt and Mark of Weapons of Mass Discussion have detailed coverage of our interview with her. I could only be there for the first half-hour, and spoke with her informally for about 10 minutes before Matt and Mark arrived.

My impressions: A genuine, “what you see is what you get” person who has thought her positions through carefully. During my time there, we made the rounds of most of the major issues pretty quickly, and she was ready, not just with memorized sound bites, but with thorough-enough justifications as to why she felt as she did.

She was ready with many examples of non-defense-related pork included in the latest defense appropriations bill, and a defense of No Child Left Behind (accompanied by a belief as a school system computer network administrator that it wasn’t matched with adequate funding). By contrast, she also observed that US education has gotten worse since Jimmy Carter started the Education Department in 1977 (hence, she agreed that if NCLB can’t get it done, serious consideration should be given to dismantling the Department).

In person, she came off as more prolife than her platform would indicate. I now interpret her actual position as being against abortion except in the narrow circumstances indicated at her site, but not making it actually illegal in other circumstances in the first trimester (implying that she would make it illegal after that point, which of course would include banning partial-birth abortions). Ardent prolifers (who I agree with personally) would say that doesn’t get it done, but I consider Deborah’s position to be 95% of the whole enchilada, i.e., not a dealbreaker. “Values conservatives” might be less than pleased with her belief that sex education should not be strictly abstinence-only, but she argues that her position will prevent the use of abortion as a birth-control method. She clearly is against cloning and embryonic stem cell research.

Matt and Mark dissect her positions on security and the War on Terror, and I’m in general agreement with their analysis, including lauding her “finish the job” position on Iraq. I also agree that in some cases Deborah didn’t identify exactly what she would do in response to the things she says have clearly gone wrong in Washington, but I’m a little more forgiving than they are, because, at least while I was there, we hit her pretty hard and quickly with questions and didn’t ask “what would you do?” ourselves.

So overall, I would consider her an acceptable candidate who has to lot to prove in terms of gaining visibility and generating grass-roots support. Someone voting for her would be doing more than casting a protest vote against the other two candidates’ real and/or imagined transgressions, and would be supporting someone who (as much as one can reach a conclusion like this from a brief meeting) would perform competently once in Washington.

I think Ms. Kraus would hold up well in a debate, which leads to another point. At this moment, it appears that incumbent Jean Schmidt has made the decision not to participate in an April 19 debate in Anderson Township for what I have to assume are in reality mostly the same reasons Ohio gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell is doing the same thing — both believe they have comfortable leads, and both think there’s more to lose than to gain by appearing. Both appear to have cancelled appearances they originally intended to make. That is, of course, their perogative, and there is obviously a risk that accompanies it that both have been willing to assume. Whether they are right about the leads they believe they have, and how smart their decisions are, remains to be seen on May 2.

Since Ms. Schmidt has withdrawn, I’m not seeing any good reason why Deborah Kraus should be excluded from that debate. Deborah says she has been told that the people running it only wanted the candidates who are going to be in the top two on May 2 to be there. Her answer is “fine, I’ll be there,” implying of course that she expects to be first or second, which is the kind of feistiness you expect from a serious challenger.

The two alternatives being floated to a Kraus appearance are, in my opinion, not helpful, and could actually be harmful even to those who think they will benefit. One option is to have challenger Bob McEwen have the night to himself, which will prevent a dialog on the issues facing the nation and the district, and lose an opportunity for both challengers to shine in a face-off. It appears from what she told us that Ms. Kraus believes that Mr. McEwen does not oppose her presence, but I want to make it clear that I am not certain of that. Of course, the McEwen camp knows how to reach me if they wish to officially comment on the desirability of a Kraus appearance.

The other alternative that is seriously being pursued is to have Saturday Night Live cast member Rachel Dratch, who satirized Jean Schmidt’s cut-and-run speech on the House floor in November in an SNL skit, attend in Schmidt’s place. While that has obvious entertainment value, it shuts out a willing challenger, and by doing so makes all who would be associated with it, including Bob McEwen, look less than serious about serving The Second District, and instead more interested in scoring “gotcha” points than in advancing a discussion of the issues. I fail to see how that helps McEwen or Kraus, and in fact believe it will make Jean Schmidt look like she made the right decision by not attending what from here appears likely to be perceived by many as a circus.

In what should be required reading for everyone in American who hasn’t already read it this Sunday morning, Peggy Noonan could not be more right (and most of the rest of the editorialists at her employer, The Wall Street Journal, more wrong).

Noonan does a great job describing and interviewing Medal of Honor winners she met last week, and then, in the excepted material that follows here, ties it in to the current immigration debate (bolds are mine, though the whole thing could be bolded):

There are a variety of things driving American anxiety about illegal immigration and we all know them–economic arguments, the danger of porous borders in the age of terrorism, with anyone able to come in.

But there’s another thing. And it’s not fear about “them.” It’s anxiety about us.

It’s the broad public knowledge, or intuition, in America, that we are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically. And if you don’t do that, you’ll lose it all.

We used to do it. We loved our country with full-throated love, we had no ambivalence. We had pride and appreciation. We were a free country. We communicated our pride and delight in this in a million ways–in our schools, our movies, our popular songs, our newspapers. It was just there, in the air. Immigrants breathed it in. That’s how the last great wave of immigrants, the European wave of 1880-1920, was turned into a great wave of Americans.

We are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically now. We are assimilating them culturally. Within a generation their children speak Valley Girl on cell phones. “So I’m like ‘no,” and he’s all ‘yeah,’ and I’m like, ‘In your dreams.’ ” Whether their parents are from Trinidad, Bosnia, Lebanon or Chile, their children, once Americans, know the same music, the same references, watch the same shows. And to a degree and in a way it will hold them together. But not forever and not in a crunch.

So far we are assimilating our immigrants economically, too. They come here and work. Good.

But we are not communicating love of country. We are not giving them the great legend of our country. We are losing that great legend.

What is the legend, the myth? That God made this a special place. That they’re joining something special. That the streets are paved with more than gold–they’re paved with the greatest thoughts man ever had, the greatest decisions he ever made, about how to live. We have free thought, free speech, freedom of worship. Look at the literature of the Republic: the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist papers. Look at the great rich history, the courage and sacrifice, the house-raisings, the stubbornness. The Puritans, the Indians, the City on a Hill.

The genius cluster–Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Madison, Franklin, all the rest–that came along at the exact same moment to lead us. And then Washington, a great man in the greatest way, not in unearned gifts well used (i.e., a high IQ followed by high attainment) but in character, in moral nature effortfully developed. How did that happen? How did we get so lucky? (I once asked a great historian if he had thoughts on this, and he nodded. He said he had come to believe it was “providential.”)

We fought a war to free slaves. We sent millions of white men to battle and destroyed a portion of our nation to free millions of black men. What kind of nation does this? We went to Europe, fought, died and won, and then taxed ourselves to save our enemies with the Marshall Plan. What kind of nation does this? Soviet communism stalked the world and we were the ones who steeled ourselves and taxed ourselves to stop it. Again: What kind of nation does this?

Only a very great one. Maybe the greatest of all.

Do we teach our immigrants that this is what they’re joining? That this is the tradition they will now continue, and uphold?

Do we, today, act as if this is such a special place? No, not always, not even often. American exceptionalism is so yesterday. We don’t want to be impolite. We don’t want to offend. We don’t want to seem narrow. In the age of globalism, honest patriotism seems like a faux pas.

And yet what is true of people is probably true of nations: if you don’t have a well-grounded respect for yourself, you won’t long sustain a well-grounded respect for others.

Because we do not communicate to our immigrants, legal and illegal, that they have joined something special, some of them, understandably, get the impression they’ve joined not a great enterprise but a big box store. A big box store on the highway where you can get anything cheap. It’s a good place. But it has no legends, no meaning, and it imparts no spirit.

Who is at fault? Those of us who let the myth die, or let it change, or refused to let it be told. The politically correct nitwit teaching the seventh-grade history class who decides the impressionable young minds before him need to be informed, as their first serious history lesson, that the Founders were hypocrites, the Bill of Rights nothing new and imperfect in any case, that the Indians were victims of genocide, that Lincoln was a clinically depressed homosexual who compensated for the storms within by creating storms without . . .

You can turn any history into mud. You can turn great men and women into mud too, if you want to.

And it’s not just the nitwits, wherever they are, in the schools, the academy, the media, though they’re all harmful enough. It’s also the people who mean to be honestly and legitimately critical, to provide a new look at the old text. They’re not noticing that the old text–the legend, the myth–isn’t being taught anymore. Only the commentary is. But if all the commentary is doubting and critical, how will our kids know what to love and revere? How will they know how to balance criticism if they’ve never heard the positive side of the argument?

Those who teach, and who think for a living about American history, need to be told: Keep the text, teach the text, and only then, if you must, deconstruct the text.

When you don’t love something you lose it. If we do not teach new Americans to love their country, and not for braying or nationalistic reasons but for reasons of honest and thoughtful appreciation, and gratitude, for a history that is something new in the long story of man, then we will begin to lose it.

We already are. It must stop.

The designation recognizes an extraordinary gesture by Hossam Abdalla last August:

Last August, New York City taxi driver Hossam Abdalla held a case that contained nearly a million dollars’ worth of gold, diamonds and titanium.

But he soon got something he considers more valuable: the satisfaction of getting it back to the jeweler who left it in his cab.

Abdalla was named New York’s cab driver of the year at a Taxi and Limousine Commission ceremony today. “Honesty for me is everything,” says the Egyptian immigrant who’s been driving since 1999.

Most of the drivers honored today were recognized for returning lost property. One returned a camcorder and videotape documenting a child’s recovery from cancer.