It’s fantastic to he…

It’s fantastic to hear that the US & UK military was able to rescue the remaining Christian Peacemaker Team hostages. Now, you’d think these folks would be grateful to their rescuers, but it’s hard to tell by their statement. The families are certainly to have their loved ones back, and the hostages are certainly glad to have their freedom back. They thank the people who prayed for them. They thank God for sustaining their friends’ courage while they were captive. But you’d be hard-pressed to hear any note of thanks to the military folks who got them out. As James Taranto notes, it seems that the people they consider most their enemies are the countries of their benefactors.

It’s not clear whom the CPT statement means by “our enemies.” But the only enemy they seem to recognize is the U.S. and its allies, whose “occupation” of Iraq is the “root cause” of the ex-hostages’ captivity, and whose detention of “thousands of Iraqis” they liken to their own kidnapping and (in one case) murder by terrorists.

But if the CPT is going to “love our enemies,” the least it could do is thank them. The statement does not acknowledge that the hostages were rescued by U.S. and British servicemen, or indeed that they were rescued at all; it refers mysteriously to their having been “released,” as if the kidnappers themselves had decided to let them go.

This seems to run deeper than a case of simple ingratitude. There is a whole strange worldview at work here–a theology, if you will. We don’t claim to understand it fully, but it seems to equate America as the root of all evil and America’s adversaries as Edenic creatures–innocents who know not good or evil and thus bear no culpability for their bad actions.

If we have this right, it follows that the CPT Christians see themselves, by virtue of their faith, as being forgiven for being American, or for being from another nation that America has corrupted. This is why they cannot be grateful to, or forgiving of, America: For them that would amount to thanking or forgiving sin itself.

Their kidnappers may have done what they did because of the presence of coalition troops, but without the troops, there would be still be violence done to people in Iraq. It would be state-sponsored, however, which apparently the CPT folks would prefer to violence that results in the ability of the people to determine the course of their own country.

By the way, on my lunch break I heard Limbaugh say that if these people hated violence so much, they shouldn’t have accepted the military help that was given to them. A principle’s a principle, eh?

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt notes a Bible passage that the CPT folks should get familiar with.

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out and Blogger News Network. Comments welcome.)

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