PEACENIK HUMAN SHIELDS IN BAGHDAD

I'm not sure how many people caught the British peaceniks screaming at the Marines in Baghdad yesterday, but here's what happened with them -- interestingly related to the U.S. flag that was raised:

“YANKEE bastard,” yelled the young British peacenik at the first American tank to roll up to the Palestine Hotel. “Go home.”

She picked a man who had waited for 576 days to give his answer. Marine First Lieutenant Tim McLaughlin leant from the turret of his Abrams tank — nickamed “Satan’s Right Hand” — and screamed back: “I was at the Pentagon September 11. My co-workers died. I don’t give a f***.”

Lieutenant McLaughlin had with him a Stars and Stripes that he had been given at the Pentagon that fateful day. In Baghdad’s Paradise Square, he handed the flag to Corporal Edward Chin, who climbed a giant statue of Saddam and draped it over the deposed dictator’s head.

The peaceniks were later calling the Marines on the ground "murderers" and "assassins" and showing them pictures of bloody bodies. The Marines ignored them at that point. Later some peacenik near the statue was yelling and holding the same pictures up. Iraqis attacked him with minimum force, enough to grab and throw the pictures away. Two Iraqis were also displaying a sign all day that said "GO HOME HUMAN SHIELDS, YOU U.S. WANKERS." Searching Google news for "wankers" today sadly only leads to a couple mentions of this episode including this one where we find out:

In The Nation today, Medea Benjamin, head of Global Exchange, pro-Castro communist and leader of the anti-American anti-war left, calls for a world-wide effort to send human shields to North Korea, Syria and Iran, the pillars of terrorist power, to give aid and comfort to the enemy.

Then there's this great article written by a Canadian in Baghdad. The author wrote in the moment of Iraq's glory:

Liberation. Emancipation. And deliverance from evil.

This is how freedom feels in Baghdad unbound: All giddy and delirious, a city intoxicated with joy. As if a great dam of yearning has burst, flooding the capital with rapture and merriment. ... The Americans got it right. Goddamn, they got it right. And it is to Canada's eternal shame that we wanted no part of this.

Great stuff. It's also amazing that random oppressed Iraqis, fed decades of pure propaganda, who just saw thousands of their countrymen killed by us, are so much more clued-in than the heartless western peaceniks:

"I cannot express to you my happiness at this moment," said a tearful Shakir Ali Skhil Al Dilam. "This is like a dream come true. Almost all my life, I have waited for my country to be free of this bastard Saddam Hussein. I am 47 years old, but I feel like today I have been reborn.

"Please, please, tell the Americans how thankful we are. I love America! And I think America must love us, too, to have done this. I am just sorry that so many American and British had to die in my country, so that we could be free. I hope, for all these martyrs, a place in paradise."

But what of the Iraqi civilians, the women and children and elderly, who've been killed in the past three weeks? Al Dilam bows his head.

"I am sorry for them. I feel pain in my heart for all these innocents who were killed. But they died because of Saddam Hussein.

"This is the shame of Iraq. That so many people had to die, not just civilians but soldiers who had no choice but to fight.

It's great to see a Muslim who knows the truth, and even knows the true character of people who deserve martyrdom and paradise. Hopefully Iraq will becomes a true ally of ours. I propose they launch an Al-Jazeera replacement out of Baghdad. It would be like an Arab Fox News Channel to replace the newly discredited Arab CNN.