Salim Mansur gets the Iraq election right in the Toronto Sun. The Iraqis are displaying immense courage in pressing ahead with their election because they so desperately want to bring into being the free society that it augurs and which was denied them in all the years of tyranny under which they suffered so badly. Yet in the west, fashionable opinion is using every oportunity to rubbish the election:

'The same lib-left media, however, did not discount the legitimacy of the recently held Palestinian election in which somewhere around 30% of Palestinians did not, or could not, vote due to circumstances beyond their control. Nor would this lib-left elite suggest Canadian elections -- with similar or higher rates of voter non-participation -- are invalid. The same elite would not have confused the Quebec crisis of a generation ago, and violence in the Montreal-Quebec City corridor with all of Canada being subject to homegrown terror. And yet this is how all of Iraq is being viewed -- through the lens of insurgency located primarily within the Sunni triangle around Baghdad'.

And then Mansur puts this in its correct historical perspective:

'During the last century, communist fellow-travellers in the West found nothing right in the effort of Americans and others who supported the cause of freedom in communist-controlled societies of the East. A similar lib-left mindset, presently at work in Canada and Europe, is unwilling to go beyond its petulant anti-Americanism and see for itself how raw the struggle for freedom is, as being witnessed in Iraq. The real story of tomorrow's election is not its flaws, but rather the common courage of people to defy insurgents as they quietly work to build a decent society'.

Absolutely.

Posted by melanie at January 29, 2005