Do "Catholic" bishops back "secular" tyrants in the Middle East

in the Catholic news, we always see laments about the fleeing Catholics in Iraq.

True, some of them are being frightened by Muslim extremists, but the dirty little secret is that Saddam Hussein essentially ran the place with Sunnis (a minority), and that many Catholics supported him because he allowed religious freedom.

So now we hear about a million Catholic refugees from Iraq, but no one wants to say: Yeah, they are afraid of payback from the majority Shiites who see them (and the Sunnis) as the reason for hundreds of thousands killed by Saddam.

Similarly, in Fides news, we see for the second time a bishop in Tripoli lamenting that there is a war, and now complaining about "civilian casualties". Were these the "civilian casualties" who were nearby when the Allies bombed some Gadaffy army trucks, and one of them was full of ammunition and exploded?

Hello: a lot more folks would have been killed if that ammunition had been used.

Uh, did he ever open his mouth when Gaddafy was stealing everything in sight or bombing civilian airliners in Europe?

And one wonders how many murders right now are occuring outside the vision of a limited press by Gaddafy and his African mercenaries? Are the refugees fleeing the fighting, or fleeing the possibility that Gaddafy will win and massacre thousands of civilians while the press is out of sight?

One is reminded of Ceylon (aka SriLanka) where the gov't finally ended a very bloody and violent "insurgency" by kicking out the NGO's and "human rights" organizations that were manipulated by the insurgents.

and I hate to say this, but back in World War II, a lot of French bishops backed the Vichy gov't because it represented law and order against those nasty rebellious folks trying to fight the Germans.


-------------------------
Right now, we see a Brit whose "report" of Israeli atrocities relied on Hamas' reports, and now two years later he laments in the Washington post : THEY LIED.

Yes, and the "Rev Jones Koran Burning" was taken out of context and exaggerated in the press and by mullahs in Afghanistan to incite murders of the innocent.

The real dirty little secret is that the press "reports" what is said, but believes liars, cheats and murderers. And too many Muslim lands have gov't press that do so deliberatly.

But no, we won't ask for the equivalent of a "Radio Free Middle East" in Farsi and Arabic.

----------------------------------------
VDHanson has a good article on the press bias, Excerpt here:

The Goldstone Report, I thought when I first scanned it, was worse than most undergraduate research papers I have graded — and therefore I expected it to be praised by the international community.

And it was until even the author, like the rare guilty undergraduate who confesses to plagiarism, wants his signature off the report.

But then long ago I got used to Israel being damned by reporters, NGOs, and the UN and EU types as apartheidists, racists, imperialists, and Nazis in direct proportion to the fact that visitors to the Middle East usually prefer to go Israeli cafes, hotels, and hospitals. Reporting on the West Bank is a 10 AM-2 PM day job, with a commute back across the green line.

Half a million Jews ethnically cleansed in the 1960s from Baghdad, Cairo, and Damascus were opportunists; half a million who fled to the West Bank twenty years earlier are still recently arrived refugees. But then I don’t know why Jerusalem is a divided city and Nicosia is not; or why the Kuril Islands or East Prussia are not similarly said to be “occupied”; or why the fence is Israel is worse than the fence in Saudi Arabia.

millions of Muslim radicals are captives of emotion and ignorant and thus not “like us,”so we must create much different standards for “them” that we don’t apply to others? We as adults laugh when symbols of Christianity are defaced in thousands of incidents; they as children naturally and understandably kill when one Koran is burned by one silly wannabe minister? Or is the Ministry’s fear that when Christ is satirized in a cartoon, no bomb shows up at the editorial office; when Mohammed is so caricatured, two do — and that because reporters are said always to be brave and publishers principled we cannot just admit to that?