Advent in Iraq, Rush Limbaugh, and reality by Ryan Beiler In August this year I began considering participation in a Christian Peacemaker Teams delegation to Iraq in November. With much prayer by friends and family, I began my discernment process, weighing the obvious risks. In Colombia I had traveled through territory controlled by guerillas with a penchant for kidnapping. In Gaza I had fled from warning shots fired by Israeli soldiers. But I had never walked in solidarity with people whose land had been invaded and occupied by my own nation's military. I struggled with the notion expressed by kidnapped peacemaker Norman Kember, the heart of the CPT mission: am I willing to take the same risks for peace that those in the military take for war? As weeks passed, circumstances and logistics dictated my choice not to go. The November delegation had filled up before I could join. And even before Kember, and fellow team members Harmeet Sooden, Jim Loney, and Tom Fox were taken hostage on Nov. 26, I had been told that my primary reason for going - photojournalism - would not be worthwhile because of the team's own security precautions. Tomorrow is the day that the so-called Swords of Righteousness Brigade have set for the peacemakers' execution if U.S. forces do not release all detainees held in Iraq. So today, with a vague sense of survivor's guilt, I reflect on the impending miracle or tragedy of these men's lives.
Their survival would be a miracle. And yet, statements of support from the likes of Hamas and cleric Abu Qatada, a suspected al Qaeda terrorist imprisoned in the U.K., are already miraculous. Our enemies - by any conventional definition - have appealed for the release of our friends. The cynic will say that support from such quarters merely confirms that CPT must be as anti-American as the terrorists. But hints of parable permeate: The Samaritan, a despised foreigner and outcast to Jesus' audience, disregards religious and ethnic division to aid one in need, while countrymen preoccupied with their own purity pass by.
Indeed, Rush Limbaugh is glad these "leftist feel-good hand-wringers" are being "shown reality." To follow his version of the parable, they'd never have fallen among thieves if they hadn't been walking on the road to Jericho in the first place. His reference to reality is intriguing, coming in support of an administration now widely regarded as out of touch with the reality in Iraq. Promises that we would be greeted as liberators, that Iraq would pay for its own invasion with oil revenue, that we knew where the weapons of mass destruction were, that only a few troops would be needed - all evaporated in the face of a reality
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