Things are a changin' in Iraq

Fire of Liberty

David Frum had a good column in today's National Post on how improved the situation in Iraq has become. While the MSM has become so obsessed with the bombings that occur in Iraq, Frum notes that there have been a sea change of events throughout the Middle East since the Iraqi elections which have completely slipped below the media's radar. Here's a taste of the changes that Frum has noted in his column:

The vast majority of the victims of the insurgents' terror war are not American or coalition soldiers, but fellow-Iraqis and fellow-Muslims. The death toll by now numbers in the thousands, including bombings of the holiest site in Shiite Islam on Shiism's holiest day. The use of suicide bombings and jihad terrorism on such a large scale by Muslims against fellow-Muslims has triggered a perceptible reaction throughout the Islamic world.

In November, 2004, a group of 26 Saudi clerics issued a communique urging jihad against U.S. forces in Iraq. In the months since, coalition forces have apprehended a number of young Saudi men. Others have been identified after they carried out their terrorist attacks. As the toll has mounted, an unusual surge of self-criticism has been expressed in the tightly controlled Saudi media.

"...The propagation of [Islamic] words of wisdom and the good preaching have turned into propaganda for murder, abductions, and car bombs," complained a columnist in the official Saudi daily Al-Jazirah. "They [the preachers] have even turned suicide from something absolutely forbidden [by Islam] into something which, according to their religious law, is a means of becoming closer to Allah." (All quotes thanks to Memri.org, the Middle East translation service.)

A columnist in another official daily, Okaz, agreed:

" ...Instead of adding fuel to the fire in Iraq, these 26 clerics should have made clear the Sharia's stand concerning a Jihad of beheadings, the kidnapping of innocent [people] and blowing up booby-trapped cars and roadside bombs against pedestrians--children, women and the elderly ... what is going on today in Iraq is madness that feeds every day on the lives of innocent Iraqis and quenches its thirst with the forbidden blood that flows mercilessly through the streets of Iraq."

Meanwhile, Sunni clerics in Iraq have issued fatwas urging young Sunni men to join the Iraqi defence forces, and Muslim intellectuals resident in the West have been speaking out against the incitement preached in many of the mosques of Europe and America.

You know that the people of these nations have grown tired of suicide bombers, fundamentalism and tyrants when they begin to step out against the forces that have enthralled them in a dilapidated mire known as the Middle East. They realize that the only way for the Middle East to pull itself out of the muck and mire then it must jump on the democracy train before it leaves them at the station. On second thought, I think they're really embracing the Fire of Liberty that the Founding Fathers lit on July 4, 1776.