a teaching moment

Sadly, Newsweek Baghdad correspondent Mike Hastings lost his about-to-be-fiancee in Iraq last week.

Andrea Parhamovich— “Andi” to her friends—was killed in an ambush in Baghdad. A 28-year-old civilian consultant working for the nonprofit National Democratic Institute, she was in a convoy when gunmen opened fire; Al Qaeda-linked Sunni insurgents claimed responsibility.

Reflecting on her death in an e-mail to his Newsweek colleagues, Hastings wrote [emphasis mine]:

“We all take risks over here, and we know the risks. It’s part of the job. But killing a soldier or getting whacked as a war correspondent is one thing—still tragic yet somehow more acceptable—but killing a civilian here to help is just despicable. Shouldn’t have happened. Is it worth it? Good question, don’t have an answer really. I hope it is, have my doubts, but more so, I hope she isn’t forgotten. She wanted to be here, to be a part of history. She loved the adventure and the romance of it all. She loved helping people, making a difference. She loved politics; her heroes were Joan of Arc and Empress SiSi of Austria. (In other words: strong independent women. Like I said, she was a handful.)

“America could not have asked for a better face, a better representative in Iraq. She’s the best and the brightest of her generation, the best of what our country stands for, and she was killed by truly evil people with a bankrupt ideology. I sound like Bush, but I think we can sometimes forget how bad these guys are.”

Well, not to put too fine a point on it… but yes.

Am I taking a cheap shot? Sure. I don’t care. I hope a bit of what Hastings and his Newsweek colleagues learned from this terrible, bitter experience will stick.

On this theme, writing in City Journal, Hitchens contemplates Mark Steyn’s obsession with

the general apathy and surrender of the West in the face of a determined assault from a religious ideology, or an ideological religion, afflicted by no sickly doubt about what it wants or by any scruples about how to get it.

Many of us share this obsession. Hitchens asks:

How does one respond, in other words, when an enemy challenges not just your cherished values but additionally forces you to examine the very assumptions that have heretofore seemed to underpin those values?

That is the question, isn’t it? Since 9/11 and up until now, liberals have consistently disappointed by falling back on Frantz Fanon:

[Liberals] cannot shake their subliminal identification of the Muslim religion with the wretched of the earth: the black- and brown-skinned denizens of what we once called the “Third World.” You can see this identification in the way that the Palestinians (about 20 percent of whom were Christian until their numbers began to decline) have become an “Islamic” cause and in the amazing ignorance that most leftists display about India, a multiethnic secular democracy under attack from al-Qaida and its surrogates long before the United States was. And you can see it, too, in the stupid neologism “Islamophobia,” which aims to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.

This kind of thinking is old, tired, and simply not good enough. Hitchens again:

Islamist suicide-terrorism has mutated into new shapes and adopted fresh grievances as a result of the mobilization against it. Liberalism has found even more convoluted means of blaming itself for the attack upon it. But at least the long period of somnambulism is over, and the opportunity now exists for antibodies to form against the infection.

Still:

The Islamist threat itself may be crude, but this is an intricate cultural and political challenge that will absorb all of our energies for the rest of our lives: we are all responsible for doing our utmost as citizens as well as for demanding more imagination from our leaders.

So I take my cheap shots where I can get them in order to preserve energy for the long fight ahead.