Health Care That's Truly Universal

From Ann Coulter's Thursday column:

Far from being sodomized and tortured by U.S. forces -- as Obama's base has wailed for the past seven years -- the innocent scholars and philanthropists being held at Guantanamo have been given expensive, high-tech medical procedures at taxpayer expense. If we're not careful, multitudes of Muslims will be going to fight Americans in Afghanistan just so they can go to Guantanamo and get proper treatment for attention deficit disorder and erectile dysfunction.

After being captured fighting with Taliban forces against Americans in 2001, Abdullah Massoud was sent to Guantanamo, where the one-legged terrorist was fitted with a special prosthetic leg, at a cost of $50,000-$75,000 to the U.S. taxpayer. Under the Americans With Disabilities Act, Massoud would now be able to park his car bomb in a handicapped parking space!

. . . .Upon his release in March 2004, Massoud hippity-hopped back to Afghanistan and quickly resumed his war against the U.S. Aided by his new artificial leg, just months later, in October 2004, Massoud masterminded the kidnapping of two Chinese engineers in Pakistan working on the Gomal Zam Dam project.

This proved, to me at least, that people with disabilities can do anything they put their minds to. Way to go, you plucky extremist!

Read the rest of "Terrorists' Restless Leg Syndrome".

'Bush 7, Terrorists 0'

Bush 7, Terrorists 0

Ann Coulter
Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Morose that there hasn't been another terrorist attack on American soil for seven long years, liberals were ecstatic when Hurricane Gustav was headed toward New Orleans during the Republican National Convention last week. The networks gave the hurricane plenty of breaking-news coverage -- but unfortunately it was Hurricane Katrina from 2005 they were covering.
On Keith Olbermann's Aug. 29 show on MSNBC, Michael Moore said the possibility of a Category 3 hurricane hitting the United States "is proof that there is a God in heaven." Olbermann responded: "A supremely good point."

Actually, Olbermann said that a few minutes later to some other idiotic point Moore had made, but that's how Moore would have edited the interview for one of his "documentaries," so I will, too. I would only add that Michael Moore's morbid obesity is proof that there is a Buddha.
Hurricane Gustav came and went without a hitch. What a difference a Republican governor makes!

As many have pointed out, the reason elected officials tend to neglect infrastructure projects, like reinforcing levees in New Orleans and bridges in Minneapolis, is that there's no glory when a bridge doesn't collapse. There are no round-the-clock news specials when the levees hold. You can't even name an overpass retrofitting project after yourself -- it just looks too silly. But everyone's taxes go up to pay for the reinforcements.

Preventing another terrorist attack is like that. There is no media coverage when another 9/11 doesn't happen. We can thank God that President George Bush didn't care about doing the safe thing for himself; he cared about keeping Americans safe. And he has, for seven years.

If Bush's only concern were about his approval ratings, like a certain impeached president I could name, he would not have fought for the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq. He would not have resisted the howling ninnies demanding that we withdraw from Iraq, year after year. By liberals' own standard, Bush's war on terrorism has been a smashing, unimaginable success.

A year after the 9/11 attack, The New York Times' Frank Rich was carping about Bush's national security plans, saying we could judge Bush's war on terror by whether there was a major al-Qaida attack in 2003, which -- according to Rich -- would have been on al-Qaida's normal schedule.

Rich wrote: "Since major al-Qaida attacks are planned well in advance and have historically been separated by intervals of 12 to 24 months, we will find out how much we've been distracted soon enough." ("Never Forget What?" New York Times, Sept. 14, 2002.)

There wasn't a major al-Qaida attack in 2003. Nor in 2004, 2005, 2006 or 2007. Manifestly, liberals thought there would be: They announced a standard of success that they expected Bush to fail.

As Bush has said, we have to be right 100 percent of the time, the terrorists only have to be right one time. Bush has been right 100 percent of the time for seven years -- so much so that Americans have completely forgotten about the threat of Islamic terrorism.

For his thanks, President Bush has been the target of almost unimaginable calumnies -- the sort of invective liberals usually reserve for seniors who don't separate their recyclables properly. Compared to liberals' anger at Bush, there has always been something vaguely impersonal about their "anger" toward the terrorists.

By my count, roughly one in four books in print in the world at this very moment have the words "Bush" and "Lie" in their title. Barnes & Noble has been forced to add an "I Hate Bush" section. I don't believe there are as many anti-Hitler books.

Despite the fact that Hitler brought "change," promoted clean, energy-efficient mass transit by making the trains run on time, supported abortion for the non-master races, vastly expanded the power of the national government and was uniformly adored by college students and their professors, I gather that liberals don't like Hitler because they're constantly comparing him to Bush.

The ferocity of the left's attacks on Bush even scared many of his conservative allies into turning on him over the war in Iraq.

George Bush is Gary Cooper in the classic western "High Noon." The sheriff is about to leave office when a marauding gang is coming to town. He could leave, but he waits to face the killers as all his friends and all the townspeople, who supported him during his years of keeping them safe, slowly abandon him. In the end, he walks alone to meet the killers, because someone has to.
That's Bush. Name one other person in Washington who would be willing to stand alone if he had to, because someone had to.

OK, there is one, but she's not in Washington yet. Appropriately, at the end of "High Noon," Cooper is surrounded by the last two highwaymen when, suddenly, his wife (Grace Kelly) appears out of nowhere and blows away one of the killers! The aging sheriff is saved by a beautiful, gun-toting woman.

Coulter Gives Bush an A++

Ann Coulter is heaping much-deserved praises on W, just as the party he's led for seven years tries to pretend they don't know him:

Bush's America: 100% Al-Qaeda Free Since 2001

Ann Coulter
Wednesday, June 11, 2008

In a conversation recently, I mentioned as an aside what a great president George Bush has been and my friend was surprised. I was surprised that he was surprised.

I generally don't write columns about the manifestly obvious, but, yes, the man responsible for keeping Americans safe from another terrorist attack on American soil for nearly seven years now will go down in history as one of America's greatest presidents.

Produce one person who believed, on Sept. 12, 2001, that there would not be another attack for seven years, and I'll consider downgrading Bush from "Great" to "Really Good."

Merely taking out Saddam Hussein and his winsome sons Uday and Qusay (Hussein family slogan: "We're the Rape Room People!") constitutes a greater humanitarian accomplishment than anything Bill Clinton ever did -- and I'm including remembering Monica's name on the sixth sexual encounter.

But unlike liberals, who are so anxious to send American troops to Rwanda or Darfur, Republicans oppose deploying U.S. troops for purely humanitarian purposes. We invaded Iraq to protect America.

It is unquestionable that Bush has made this country safe by keeping Islamic lunatics pinned down fighting our troops in Iraq. In the past few years, our brave troops have killed more than 20,000 al-Qaida and other Islamic militants in Iraq alone. That's 20,000 terrorists who will never board a plane headed for JFK -- or a landmark building, for that matter.

We are, in fact, fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them at, say, the corner of 72nd and Columbus in Manhattan -- the mere mention of which never fails to enrage liberals, which is why you should say it as often as possible.

The Iraq war has been a stunning success. The Iraqi army is "standing up" (as they say), fat Muqtada al-Sadr --the Dr. Phil of Islamofascist radicalism -- has waddled off in retreat to Iran, and Sadr City and Basra are no longer war zones. Our servicemen must be baffled by the constant nay-saying coming from their own country.

The Iraqis have a democracy -- a miracle on the order of flush toilets in that godforsaken region of the world. Despite its newness, Iraq's democracy appears to be no more dysfunctional than one that would condemn a man who has kept the nation safe for seven years while deifying a man who has accomplished absolutely nothing in his entire life except to give speeches about "change."

(Guess what Bill Clinton's campaign theme was in 1992? You are wrong if you guessed: "bringing dignity back to the White House." It was "change." In January 1992, James Carville told Steve Daley of The Chicago Tribune that it had gotten to the point that the press was complaining about Clinton's "constant talk of change.")

Monthly casualties in Iraq now come in slightly lower than a weekend with Anna Nicole Smith. According to a CNN report last week, for the entire month of May, there were only 19 troop deaths in Iraq. (Last year, five people on average were shot every day in Chicago.) With Iraqi deaths at an all-time low, Iraq is safer than Detroit -- although the Middle Eastern food is still better in Detroit.

Al-Qaida is virtually destroyed, surprising even the CIA. Two weeks ago, The Washington Post reported: "Less than a year after his agency warned of new threats from a resurgent al-Qaida, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden now portrays the terrorist movement as essentially defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and on the defensive throughout much of the rest of the world, including in its presumed haven along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border."

It's almost as if there's been some sort of "surge" going on, as strange as that sounds.

Just this week, The New York Times reported that al-Qaida and other terrorist groups in Southeast Asia have all but disappeared, starved of money and support. The U.S. and Australia have been working closely with the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, sending them counterterrorism equipment and personnel.

But no one notices when 9/11 doesn't happen. Indeed, if we had somehow stopped the 9/11 attack, we'd all be watching Mohammed Atta being interviewed on MSNBC, explaining his lawsuit against the Bush administration. Maureen Dowd would be writing columns describing Khalid Sheik Mohammed as a "wannabe" terrorist being treated like Genghis Khan by an excitable Bush administration.

We begin to forget what it was like to turn on the TV, see a tornado, a car chase or another Pamela Anderson marriage and think: Good -- another day without a terrorist attack.
But liberals have only blind hatred for Bush -- and for those brute American interrogators who do not supply extra helpings of bearnaise sauce to the little darlings at Guantanamo with sufficient alacrity.

The sheer repetition of lies about Bush is wearing people down. There is not a liberal in this country worthy of kissing Bush's rear end, but the weakest members of the herd run from Bush. Compared to the lickspittles denying and attacking him, Bush is a moral giant -- if that's not damning with faint praise. John McCain should be so lucky as to be running for Bush's third term. Then he might have a chance.

Copyright © 2008 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

Freethinking Isn't Free

From time to time in politics there are issues that are so divisive they exclude any neutral position--claim a middle ground only at the expense of your moral existence and any claim to rational thought. These kinds of issues force people to choose sides, even against people whom formerly were close allies.

Abortion does that: you can’t deny what grows in a pregnant woman’s belly, so if you want to endorse its homicide you’ll have to choose to make your own the specious arguments of that side, like that aborting mothers are having their “lives” saved by the procedure, and "anti-choice" advocates are not trying to save babies, but only hurt women. It took 25 years for Naomi Wolf to finally admit, “Yeah, we know we’re killing babies. You got a problem with that?”

The war against jihadism is the same; with an enemy so explicit about hating us, and so devoted to killing us as the Islamists are, that denying we're in a war means a complete mental shutdown (you know, sort of like the Democratic debate series). So if you really must try to prevent our side from fighting back, you’ll have to embrace the insane position that all that violence out there is the result of us unfairly attacking them.

John McCain’s likely nomination is going to force that kind of choosing up. Supporters of McCain, many of them highly respected, very intelligent, usually rational, many of them exemplary leaders, are simply not going to be able to keep saying that McCain is clearly a conservative when he clearly is not. And because they all know he clearly is not, sooner or later they're going to have to choose to explain those of us who won't trust McCain the same way liberals always explain conservatives, as just a bunch of intolerant, narrow-minded wackos.

By way of example, today Detroit News editorial page editor Nolan Finley, whom we here at DU have, at least once or twice, had a kind word for, reveals how angry he is that McCain isn’t being embraced by “the Republican Party's right wing.” In fact, he’s gone and called us all “self-righteous screechers” and “right-wing nuts.” (“No room in GOP tent for free thinkers”).

Using as an example the experience of former Michigan Congressman Joe Schwartz, (a one-term Republican turned out in 2006 for being too liberal), Finley describes how Schwartz must now watch “the GOP’s self-righteous screechers try to hang a scarlet ‘L’ around the neck of his good friend John McCain.” Finley explains that the self-righteous party purists can’t stand McCain because he’s an independent thinker who has engaged in the “occasional flirtation with moderate politics.”

But to describe McCain’s magnetic attraction to moderate-to-liberal politics as an occasional flirtation is like saying that Kwame Kilpatrick has been rumored, in those rare instances he encounters a woman he finds more attractive than his wife, to bestow upon her a chaste, good-natured wink.

Nor does it speak well for Finley’s confidence in his man’s bona fides that he has to viciously attack someone like Ann Coulter as a “character assassin” with an “emaciated face.” (We recall that Finley last year insulted our friend Debbie Schlussel by denouncing her as a “chubby Ann Coulter”; Nolan must have a very exacting standard for when a woman is just right). Anyhow, Coulter’s ironical-satirical announcement that she would vote for Clinton because President Hillary might arguably govern in a fashion less liberal than McCain is intended to draw attention to McCain’s liberal record, and has nothing to do with actually endorsing Clinton.

I'm sure the non-angry Finley might figure that out. But he's chafing against his loyalty to the freethinking John McCain. And we already know that when one side in an argument hasn’t any facts, it promptly resorts to name-calling. (By the way, I don’t consider political commentators referring to McCain as “liberal” as calling names. I haven't heard anybody call McCain a "liberal nut." Nor is it possible to discuss American politics without placing people and ideas somewhere along the liberal-conservative extremes. On the other hand, I think being called a “right wing nut” is meant to be an insult.)

Finley wants to see the GOP move to the center, which means farther to the left. But we didn't win in 2004, 2000, and 1994 by running away from conservative principles, even if our leadership didn't always live up to the ideals. And if the party had stayed closer to its tradition the past few years, we wouldn’t have lost Congress in 2006.

But Schwartz and Finley think the Republicans will be better off with more freethinkers and less “ideology,” (i.e., less Reagan conservatism). Schwartz describes those folks with cold objectivity as “the same gang that got me.”

Not that I’m saying these guys are “liberals,” (chubby, emaciated, or otherwise). But just check out this list of what Joe Schwartz and Finley like and don’t like about the current Republican Party.

They dislike “moral absolutism,” “conservative orthodoxy,” and “doctrinal purity,” and they prefer “pragmatism,” “influence,”and victory based upon the sentiments of the “center” (the left).

Freedom of thought is one thing, being a “freethinker” another. The term “freethinker” actually denotes a person drifting along in a sea of moral relativism, resistant to hard-and-fast rules, and mistrustful of the constraints of tradition, religion, society, etc.--in other words, freethinkers are liberals. The opposite of being a freethinker is to hold firm principles. In other words, conservative. (The official flower of the freethinker, by the way, is the pansy. (“A Pansy for Your Thoughts”). Not, for all I dislike his politics, that I think McCain is a pansy.)

But it doesn’t shock my conscience if there’s no room for such freethinking people in the Republican Party. Don't they already have their own party, and at least 2 others if you count the Greens and the Socialist Workers Party? And isn’t Cindy Sheehan getting a new one up?

You see, it's the rest of us who still need a party. Leave this one alone.

Life sometime pitches us a moral dilemma. It may well be that I do vote for McCain next November, holding my nose, as all those other millions who say they’ll be holding their noses (here’s an idea: we can all leave the polls showing off our pinched red noses the same way the liberated Iraqis proudly showed off their purple fingers--we can even start the rumor that Bill Clinton secretly voted for McCain). I would do this, naturally, only to avoid the greater moral evil of helping elect a nation-ending Clinton or Obama administration. But the reason it will pose a dilemma is precisely because I'm squeezed from onse side by a pragmatic need to spare the country a Democratic government in wartime, and from the other by certain moral and political absolutes and orthodoxies that I hold dear--and that McCain does not hold dear-in fact, despises.

Also, I was one of the people extremely unhappy that in 2006 Republican voters felt that “punishing” their party by allowing a Democratic majority in Congress made either moral or political sense, when to me it made neither. Sometimes adulthood means you don't get a choice of good and evil, only a choice between evils.

In spite of Finley’s feeling the need to say it, McCain’s nomination is still not “inevitable.” It is not even mid-February. We conservatives have only just been bereaved of any viable conservative nominee, and we ought to be entitled to a few weeks of grieving the fact and discussing our options before we resign ourselves (if we do) to having to support a demon in preference to an archdemon. But I don’t have to put up with any revision of reality that will make me start believing McCain is a conservative.

To me that makes us, on some level anyway, principled. To the freethinking Nolan Finley, that just makes us all right-wing nuts.

ADC: Let's Stamp Out Anti-Semitism, Israel

Take a second to check out the ADC’s online press release condemning next week’s Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. (“ADC Leads Effort Against Hate Campaign on Campus”).

You will find there the expected fulminations against the “hate speech” anticipated from speakers like David Horowitz, Ann Coulter, Daniel Pipes, and Robert Spencer. There’s also a pretentious statement made by ADC Executive Director Kareem Shora. On the one hand, he agrees Horowitz, et al, are entitled to exercise free speech. But you know he isn't going to leave it there:

“However, ADC is seriously concerned that such a notorious lineup of racist, bigoted, Islamophobic, and anti-Semitic speakers will serve not to educate but to promote hatred and spread misinformation and lies. Let us not forget that these are the same lies that have lead, and continue to lead, to hate crimes and attacks against minorities including African-Americans, Jews, Muslims, homosexuals, and others based on stereotypes. The points of view espoused by this campaign are not ones that belong in any reasonable debate as it serves to promote hatred of an entire religion or ethnic origin.”

Which only makes sense, as Shora keeps repeating, (including on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal this morning), that the ADC is a “civil rights organization.” So when the ADC condemned Ann Coulter last week, it's because they’re all about stopping anti-Semitism.

Then, take a look at the left-hand margin of the webpage at this map, captioned “History of Palestine,” but strangely giving no sign of the existence of the State of Israel.

The ADC borrowed the map from USA Today, (where it's bigger), where it was originally used to depict Palestine right after World War II, before Israel became a state. The ADC could easily have found a graphic representing modern Israel, but likes this one.

And right above their map is the reason why they like it: their “ADC Factsheet” explains that “The illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian land is the foremost obstacle to peace.”

In other words, no Israel = peace.

But Horowitz, Pipes, Coulter, and Spencer are the anti-Semites.

Ahmadinejad We Can Handle--It's Those Students Who Keep Me Awake Nights

It’s been more than a week now since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made his historic appearance at Columbia University for the sake of academic freedom. The Republic seems to have survived so far.

I hated that Columbia gave him this forum. But overall I don’t think the little president did anything much that was the least bit startling, or even memorable. We expected him to lie, and he lied. We expected him to equivocate over destroying Israel, and he did so, in utterly unmemorable language. Except, of course, for his remark about homosexuals in Iran, which at least was interesting.



Otherwise, no one was fooled by him during his visit who hadn’t already committed to being fooled by him before he got here. Now he’s back in Iran, no more, and no less, dangerous than he was before. And it will go with him as Allah has ordained, or the mullahs decide.

So I’m no more disturbed by Ahmadinejad now than I was before last week. But what I do find to be disturbed about are the Columbia students who clearly were so thrilled with him. As Ann Coulter describes the essence of that encounter (“Tase Him Bro!”):

At Ahmadinejad's speech, every vicious anti-Western civilization remark was cheered wildly. It was like watching an episode of HBO'S "Real Time With Bill Maher."

Ahmadinejad complained that the U.S. and a few other "monopolistic powers, selfish powers" were trying to deny Iranians their "right" to develop nukes.

Wild applause.

Ahmadinejad repeatedly refused to answer whether he seeks the destruction of the state of Israel.

Wild applause.

He accused the U.S. of supporting terrorism.

Wild applause.

Only when Ahmadinejad failed to endorse sodomy did he receive the single incident of booing throughout his speech.

Which signifies exactly this: the Columbia U students represented by this cross-section of cheering fans can wildly applaud the little president’s anti-Western attacks because they don’t see themselves as Westerners, they know even less than Ahmadinejad does about what the West, and especially the religious West, is all about, and the whole concept of being Western has no reality for them. Consquently, being Western is nothing of value to them.

They can wildly applaud their own country being accused of being “monopolistic,” and cheer the supposed "right" of a deranged terrorist theocracy to have the bomb, because the grave danger to the Middle East, to Israel, and even to themselves has absolutely no reality to them, and has no value in their eyes.

They can applaud wildly Ahmadinejad’s transparent refusal to answer questions about his oft-stated intention of destroying Israel, understanding completely that he is in fact endorsing the threat by refusing to deny it, because what Israel is, why it exists, what it faces in order to survive, and especially that Israel is one of our strongest allies, means absolutely nothing to them, and has no reality to them, and preventing a second Jewish genocide and standing by a worthy ally against implacably evil enemies is not a value to them.

They can cheer wildly when the little president accuses their country of “supporting terrorism,” because their ignorance of what terrorism is, and which nations wholesale in it, and which nations, like their own, don’t ever deserve to be called such a thing, is so far beyond their moral aptitude that the term “terrorism” is nothing more than an insult, like calling someone a “bitch,” a “control freak,” or a “Nazi.”. The idea of becoming indignant when a lying Persian rat tells them to their faces that their country is the real evil of the globe is just not something that they care about.

But it turns out what they absolutely care about is protecting one of the central myths of gay rights dogma. This is what morality is to them. College students will cheer what they don’t understand and don’t really believe where there is some perverse antagonistic pleasure to be derived from it. But booing has to come from the heart.

Actually, the students didn’t boo the little president right away, and they didn’t boo him for the reasons people seem to think they did. First they jeered and laughed at him for daring to suggest that there were no homosexuals in Iran. Why was that funny? Because, as every sexually educated Columbia U student can tell you, homosexuality is ubiquitous in every age and nation, and we in our country only admit to the low 10% estimate because we’re so homophobic that the rest of the poor buggers have to stay hidden in the closet.

One of the bedrock tenets of the gay-rights movement is its vastly inflated estimate of the percentage of the species who are homosexual, a myth essential for achieving the illusions of normalcy and moral equality with heterosexuals. So to suggest that there is anyplace, anywhere, anytime, that has not got its requisite assignment of queers, lesbians, transgendered persons, dikes, and drag queens only proves that the speaker is a fool. Informed laughter must result.

Although within minutes pundits and cartoonists were pointing out that Iran’s lack of homosexuals may be related to its policy of executing them, that fact, and that irony, had nothing to do with why the students were jeering and laughing in that particular moment. They were just laughing because heterodox opinions about homosexuality hit them right where they live, and it was so unexpectedly ridiculous, they couldn’t help but laugh.

(Remember that no one at a podium had ever said something like that to them in all their years of American education!)

And only when Ahmadinejad stuck to his guns did they boo. They booed for the same reasons evangelicals would boo if Christopher Hitchens crashed their church services and told them there was no God. They booed because this man was insulting one of their dearest personal dogmas.

How many gays there are, surviving, in Iran, I have no way of knowing. That’s not my point.

My point is, why didn’t the students laugh when Ahamdinejad tried to claim his backwards, seventh-century world was superior to the modern West, Europe, America, and Columbia University?

Why didn’t they laugh when he told them Iran had a right to nuclear weapons?

Why didn’t they laugh when the president of the leading terrorist-supporting government on Earth said it was the United States that supports terrorism?

All these statements were every bit as false, and even more so, and certainly more ridiculous than what he said about Iran having no gays.

My point is that Ahmadinejad’s unintended foo-poo about Iran’s gays inadvertently illuminated the moral priorities of these American students--casting into relief not what they’ll cheer for, but what they’ll boo. An incinerated Israel, a subjugated America, a nuclear Iran, Who cares? But how dare that little twerp try to come in here and tell us there are no Homo-Iranians? Snap!

I believe that when Ahmadinejad returned to Tehran, and was debriefed by the military planners of the Iranian Military Guard, it went something like this:

“Will they fight, Mr. President? Will these Americans fight us over the bomb? Will they fight us if we attack Israel? Will these infidels fight to defend their own blasphemous country?”

“Not a chance, boys. I don’t want to be uncharitable, but these infidels are a joke. We’ll get our bomb, okay. We’ll roast Israel without too much trouble, and I tell you the people of the Great Satan will tear each other to pieces before they’ll ever retaliate. But there is one thing I'm kind of concerned about.”

“What’s that, boss?”

“The American homosexuals. The infidels are clearly quite loyal to them. And they can be really vicious!”

Taliban Murders a Victory for South Korea's Missionaries

Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.
Psalm 116.15

Second Korean Hostage In Afghanistan Shot Dead
7/30/2007 3:11:39 PM

Taliban militants have killed a second South Korean from a group of 23 held hostage in south Afghanistan on Monday. A spokesman for the militants has said that they have shot dead the Christian missionary because the Afghan authorities did not listen to their demands. It is reported that the Taliban will kill more hostages if Kabul ignores their demand to release rebel prisoners, but the militants gave no new deadline.With this, the number of Koreans killed by the hijackers since they have captured 23 Koreans 12 days ago from a bus in Ghazni province to the southwest of Kabul has increased to two. The militants killed the leader of the group on Wednesday after an earlier deadline passed. The office of the governor of Ghazni and local police have confirmed the killing. The identity of the victim has not been disclosed, except that it is a male. The rebels had threatened to start killing the South Korean hostages if their demand for releasing militants from prison was not met within the deadline. The capturers have extended the deadline seven times since the Christian missionaries including women were abducted.Earlier on Monday, Afghan governor Waheedullah Mujadadi had pleaded with the militants to give more time for negotiations.

The quiet story of the South Korean Christian missionaries being murdered one by one by a Taliban gang in Pakistan is not attracting very much attention. It’s easy to miss the story among the growing pile of reports of battles large and small being fought by Islam against the rest of the world on cultural, political, and military fronts.

It needs to be kept in mind, though, that in spite of what our political leaders have to say, (out of deference, really, to the limits of our secular democracies to wage wars of religion), this struggle with Islam is first and foremost a religious war. The Taliban murdered the missionaries mainly because they are Christians, and secondarily to terrify South Korea into squelching its generous evangelistic impulse to keep sending missionaries to Taliban-land in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

This latter tactic seems to be having at least some success: in South Korea there have been angry outburst directed at the missionaries, for being foolish enough to “to go to Afghanistan and preach about the Christian God," (“South Koreans question Afghan aid mission”).

Not that all all South Koreans are critical. One Christian says that, in spite of the critics, “Some Korean Christians think it's a good thing to go to Afghanistan and die trying to proselytize on behalf of their religion."

That's die trying to proselytize, notice, not kill.

I understand that South Korea is second only to the USA in the number of missionaries they send abroad. Seeing Christian missionaries murdered this way, by the worst examples of the worst and most demonic perversion of monotheistic religion, is painful. But I can’t believe any Christian martyrdom is ever a tragedy, when each martyr's death is always a victory in the larger, and often unrecognized, spiritual battle that rages.

As the Korean Christian pointed out, some Christians think it’s a “good idea,” to die trying to proselytize. While I’ve never personally known a Christian martyr (now Christians with martyr complexes, that's another story), but I’m sure risking life never seems like a good idea to the martyrs’ survivors. Those left behind regret that more caution would have spared their loved one’s life. History records that the Judean Christians warned St. Paul that if he returned to Jerusalem it would surely lead to his death, and even St. Peter tried to prevent Jesus from his mission in Jerusalem, but to no avail.

Here's a thought: Do you remember Ann Coulter’s famous suggestion after 9/11 that our best response to Islamism would be to "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity"? ("Journalism: Where even the men are women").

The model she had in mind, by the way, was not the made-up myth of the Crusades, but the much more recent American policy in the Far East after World War II and the Korean War:

“this is…what America [did] after World War II, after the Korean War. MacArthur put out a call for Christian missionaries to come, and missionaries poured into Japan. They poured into Korea. It didn't work as well, the conversion in Japan, but it certainly did in Korea."

Now, while the armies of civiliazation struggle against flesh-and-blood Islamic adversaries in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, South Koreans are alongside anxious to wagethe genuine spiritual warfare by sending Ambassadors for Christ into some of the most malevolently anti-Christian corners of the planet.

Ann Coulter made a great point, as usual. It seems to me McArthur's timing couldn't have been better.