The Left's New Friends

Andrew McCarthy has another terrific piece on why the ISG Student Council Report was so foolish to suggest serious negotiations with Iran and Syria. In his article, McCarthy points out that it's impossible to make an argument for negotiations with Iran/Syria that isn't also simultaneously an argument for negotiating with Hamas/Hezbollah.

Then McCarthy reminded me of facts that I'd forgotten, even when I was mocking liberals like Grace Ross for holding their pro-Hezbollah rallies here in Boston:

Fresh from its 1979 siege of the U.S. embassy and the humiliating hostage-taking that ensued, the Islamic Republic of Iran... created Hezbollah in 1982. Primarily based in Lebanon, where American forces were massed to calm the bloody aftermath of Israel’s expulsion of Arafat’s PLO, the “Party of God” (Hizb Allah) claimed in its manifesto to be

"the vanguard … made victorious by God in Iran. There the vanguard succeeded to lay down the bases of a Muslim state which plays a central role in the world. We obey the orders of one leader, wise and just, that of our tutor and faqih (jurist) who fulfills all the necessary conditions: [Ayatollah] Ruhollah Musawi Khomeini. God save him!"

Over the quarter century that followed, Hezbollah received billions in aid from Iran, as well as aid, logistical support, and safe haven from Syria, with which it works hand-in-glove to strangle Lebanon and wage war against Israel... In April 1983, for example, a Hezbollah car bomb killed 63 people, including eight CIA officials, at the U.S. embassy in Beirut. More infamously, the organization six months later truck-bombed a military barracks in Beirut, murdering 241 United States Marines (and killing 58 French soldiers in a separate attack).

Hezbollah: Murderers, terrorists, anti-semites...and friends of the Massachusetts Left. How can a liberal candidate for governor appear at a Hezbollah rally and not be challenged by the press? How can James Baker urge negotiations with terror-sponsors while they are committing terrorism and be cheered by the Boston Globe-Democrat?

This is the same Boston Globe-Democrat who just ran an editorial denouncing economist Milton Friedman for giving the Pinochet government of Chile economic advice that helped lift hundreds of thousands of its citizens out of poverty. So it's OK to make bargains with terrorists but NOT OK to give non-political economic advice to help poor people with governments the BG-D doesn't like?

I can't wait to hear the new chant at the next Lefty rally here in Boston: Screw The Poor, but Support The Terrorists!