Michael Yon has a gruesome report from Iraq, with graphic photos:

Soldiers from 5th IA said al Qaeda had cut the heads off the children. Had al Qaeda murdered the children in front of their parents? Maybe it had been the other way around: maybe they had murdered the parents in front of the children. Maybe they had forced the father to dig the graves of his children.

This isn't civil war. It's a war on the Iraqi people, and on decency itself, by a mindless, butchering hateful ideology. And in their savagery, they use our own decency against us, booby trapping bodies because they know that we, unlike they, honor the dead.

Sorry Rand, all the liberal symphaty is reserved for Darfur.

Let's think about this one a minute.

If we kill innocent Iraqis, we're told, we've created some untold number of jihadis, guerrillas, insurgents who will hate us. This is the pool from which suicide bombers, IED-planters, etc. are drawn.

Yet, here is al-Qaeda killing plenty of Iraqis. They've killed Sunnis, they've killed Shi'a. Are we to believe that, somehow, the Iraqis are okay with this? Or are we to believe that al-Qaeda only kills those who support the US?

Or, perhaps, is it that the whole "action-reaction" story peddled above is simply a lot of hooey?

I'm going to go with the "Hooey" theory, myself.

Rand and LO, you misspelled "bullshit."

Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barrack Obama, and practically ever other democrat in DC wants us to leave the Iraqi people to these SOB's. I didn't include Hillary as we don't know what she really wants. She just says what she thinks will get her elected, but that too shows how little she really cares about the Iraqi people.

We get 37 straight days of page 1 stories about Abu Ghraib from the NY Slimes but this will never see the light of day in that SP propaganda rag. I've sent Mr. Yon money and will send him more. More people should.

Ah, the "soft bigotry of low expectations."

OF COURSE "they" act like savages. What can you expect? But WE mustn't act like savages.

OF COURSE the Palestinians will have a JOOOOOOOOO kill a children's character on television. What can you expect? But let the Israelis produce anything but the unvarnished truth (identified as that which makes them look bad) and they are the betrayers of civility and civilization.

A license, in essence, not only for double standards, but loudly and proudly declaiming that one has double standards.

That "they" will never be judged by the same standards, and that this redounds to their benefit, will never be explicitly discussed, but will be the case.

But let it never be forgotten that those who hold this view are the enlightened members of the "reality-based" community, while those who might hold all groups to one set of standards are somehow racists and non-reality-based.