Joan Swirsky
Thursday, May 13, 2004

But a couple of weeks later, Mother Teresa died and to prove that the deaths of public figures had equal weight in their "objective" eyes, they tromped to the steaming climes of Calcutta, pretending that serious journalism was as interesting to them as sexy journalism. As if the death of an elderly nun who had dedicated her life to serving the poor was just as important – and as good for ratings – as the death of a gorgeous young royal killed with her lover in a tunnel in France.

No one bought it. But the death of Mother Teresa certainly put things in perspective.

Now we have the "scandal" of a few miscreant American soldiers who engaged in the perverse humiliation of their prisoners in Iraq’s Al Ghraib prison and, once again, the leftist media have gone into action, wringing their collective hands in outrage, describing the incidents as too vile for mere words and the administration under which these aberrational acts took place as worthy of impeachment.

Once again, however, fate – in a ghastly act of terrorism – has intervened to expose exactly where our media’s sympathies really lie. Surely, slicing into the neck of Nick Berg while he screamed in pain and terror, his blood spurting in all directions and his murderers gleefully chanting and laughing while videotaping his demise merits even more impassioned coverage and outrage.

More than that which inspired the likes of Dan Rather to shed crocodile tears over those naked thugs in the Al Ghraib prison and our Congress to spring into action with "hearings" designed to castigate our secretary of defense and, by association, our president.

Who can forget the hysteria of leftists such as Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy – the list is unfortunately long – who couldn’t wait to show us their humanity by bleeding empathy for the Iraqi prisoners while they attacked our military leaders? Or the shameless actions of presidential candidate John Kerry, who, within minutes of learning of the scandal, launched a petition to remove Donald Rumsfeld from office!

Strange, isn’t it, and execrable, that media coverage of Berg’s death has turned out to be boilerplate – “just the facts, ma’am” reporting that, unlike their accounts of Al Ghraib, points no fingers and inspires no hearings.

And where is the outrage of Kerry and company over the 26-year-old civilian’s grotesque murder? After a full day of campaigning – during which he demonstrated how seriously he took the barbaric execution of an innocent American by veering not a millimeter from his “healthcare agenda” – he finally responded to disgusted journalists who had been asking him about it, to no avail, the whole day.

Hemming, hawing and using the most convoluted language, he managed to do two things at the same time: say nothing of substance and express the flat emotion of someone addressing disappointment over a soggy tuna fish sandwich!

The media were no better (with the notable exceptions of the Fox News Network and publications like The NY Sun and The Wall St. Journal). Except for mumbling the requisite "it’s horrible, terrible, etc.," their voices were all but mute when it came to assigning blame. Their double standard of outrage brings hypocrisy to a level heretofore unseen, save for that of the terrorists themselves. I’m listening, but all I hear is a thunderous, deafening, ear-splitting silence!

And nowhere were their fingers pointing at the savage terrorists in the Islamofascist world who held up Berg’s head as a trophy, and at our “friends” in the Arab world and the Muslim "clerics" who have uttered not one word of apology and have failed to express even a lip-service version of sorrow.

This is because Kerry and his minions fervently believe that everything bad that comes to America and Americans is the result of "something" we’ve done, for instance committing the sin – in their eyes – of being a capitalist nation that is economically strong, militarily powerful and magnanimous beyond description.

That is why they hold their tongues when terrorists strike – and why the corrupt U.N., by its votes, embraces them – always preferring to search for their "motives" rather than for ways to stem their assaults upon our way of life.

Recently, Robert Elder, a Vietnam veteran who served with Kerry, reminded his audience that upon returning from the war, Kerry turned against his fellow soldiers, slandering them and vilifying our country’s heroic but doomed efforts to stem communism in Southeast Asia.

Elder gave a chilling preview of how America’s war on terrorism might look under a Kerry presidency: "It is a fact that in the entire Vietnam War we did not lose one major battle," he said. "We lost the war at home, and at home John Kerry was the field general."

Thank God President Bush sees with laser-like vision that Nick Berg’s death forebodes our own.

With no illusions about the difficulty of our task and the heartbreaking toll it extracts from the heroes who serve our country in faraway lands, he has stayed focused on the most important challenge to face our country in its history: establishing a democratic way of life in a part of the world that has been a virulent breeding ground for those who would destroy us with as much glee and savagery as they did the young Philadelphian.

Nick Berg’s death was tragic and a grievous loss to his family and loved ones, but he did not die in vain. Rather, his cold-blooded annihilation served to jolt our nation into remembering September 11 and the fact that we are in Iraq to rid the world of the terrorists who want the rest of us dead.

Joan Swirsky is a New-York-based journalist and author who can be reached at joansharon@aol.com.