Other voices, other rooms

Just something worth noting. From the Iraqi Press Monitor for October 26, quoting al-Mada, a daily paper of the Al-Mada institution for Media, Culture, and Arts:

Hundreds of handicapped who have received aid from the charity organization Care have called for the release of Margaret Hassan, the Care leader kidnapped on October 19. In a public demonstration, the handicapped - some of them in wheelchairs - held up large pictures of Hassan, who has been an activist with Care in Iraq since 1992. One placard said "Margaret is not the British government".

Indeed she is not and CARE is not the occupation. Some of these sort of kidnappings of aid workers and the like are just opportunistic, using the rubric of "anti-occupation" as a cover. But frankly, I believe a good deal more reflect what can best be labeled political ignorance, shallow thinking, undertaken by people who persist in imagining they are striking great revolutionary blows by victimizing the innocent. They are fools.

And to the extent they realize the innocence of their victims, they are simply cold-blooded killers.