Never let the facts stand in the way of a good self-flagellation

I hope that all of our readers will check out this editorial by the Jerusalem Post. The editorial has the audacity to actually place the prison abuses by Americans in perspective, reminding readers, for example, that in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, henchmen would feed prisoners into shredders and shoot them for sport. This fact, coupled with the fact that the U.S. has taken prompt action to investigate the abuses, shows how preposterous it is for the likes of Anthony Lewis, not to mention the “Arab street, to accuse the U.S. holding dictatorships to high ideals that it is unwilling to abide by.
Here are some highlights from the JP’s editorial:
“The abuses in one prison are already morphing into a claim that the US is maintaining its own ‘gulag,’ as alleged by a New York Times editorial headlined ‘The military archipelago.’ The attempt to compare prisons filled with alleged terrorists and other jihadis with gulags past and present is obscene and an insult to the victims of terrorists and dictators. How can enlightened people, who claim to care about human rights, compare the real gulags that now exist in places like Iran and North Korea, in which thousands of innocent people are being killed and tortured far from the public eye, to the American incarceration of terrorist suspects?
“Regardless of where one stands on the debate over how to fight terrorism, it is incumbent on all those who care about human rights not to debase this fundamental concept by conflating its exceptional violation by countries who believe deeply in it with its rampant trampling by those who do not. Nor should we in the West, because of lamentable but exceptional incidents, condemn ourselves and the world to much greater injustices by simply throwing in the towel in this war to defend our freedom and beliefs.”

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