"Killers with Cameras"

IMAGINE if, on D-Day, the Nazis had been allowed to place camera teams on Omaha Beach — with our suffering soldiers forbidden to interfere. What if, on top of that, the Germans had invented American atrocities against French civilians — and our own officials defended their right to do so in the name of press freedom?

That's the situation with al-Jazeera in Iraq.

Staffed by embittered exiles and pan-Arabist ideologues — the last Nasserites — al-Jazeera is so consumed by hatred of America and the West that the network would rather see Iraq collapse into a bloodbath than permit the emergence of a democracy sponsored by Washington.

Despite his slaughter of a million-and-a-half Muslims in wars and campaigns of repression, al-Jazeera cheered for Saddam during Operation Iraqi Freedom, inventing Iraqi victories. Its staff reacted with horror to the fall of Baghdad — and suppressed film clips of celebrating Arabs.

Since then, al-Jazeera has glamorized Islamic terrorists (who, were they ever to come to power, would close al-Jazeera and butcher its staff) while portraying the Baathist campaign of murder and sabotage as a noble freedom struggle.

Al-Jazeera is so bigoted and morally debased that its reporters and producers delight in Coalition casualties, in dead Iraqi doctors and engineers and (above all) in dead Kurds.

Al-Jazeera not only encourages the assassination of American soldiers, but pulls out all the stops to excite anti-U.S. hatred throughout the Arabic-speaking world.

The response of our own officials in Iraq? Al-Jazeera is only exercising freedom of the press. Isn't that why we fought to bring down Saddam?

This is idiocy, a perverse political correctness based upon a rejection of common sense.

Read the whole glorious thing: Killers with Cameras, by Ralph Peters of the New York Post.