by Ed Sumcad

    ....Something is terribly wrong when some of us cry with a heavy heart while the rest is in a joyful celebration of this nation’s Independence Day.

         July 4th is not just about the Declaration of Independence. It is the bright shining day of heroes when, like the sun in summer, patriotism burns in the hearts of Americans.  For there can be no such other affinity nearer to God and country than when we celebrate July 4th -- our Independence Day.

      Yet this thought romances the stone.  On July 4th, the fireworks of iniquity, malice and anger of those who protest the war in Iraq, are very disturbing every time we drown ourselves in the clangorous explosions – verbal blasts or black powder bangs – that split the ears and punctured the evening sky when we celebrate our Independence Day.

      When televised bombastic attacks – surprisingly this includes abusive reports of many pseudo-human rights organizations -- demean and disgrace our soldiers in Vietnam and now in Iraq calling them “murderers”, patriotism is one arm’s length away too far, if not in fact one which may be described as deceitful and disloyal, or to the legalese mind, an act of treason.

       A great number of the population expresses love of country. Unfortunately, some of us become jingoistic in the heat of passion and compassion when in journalism, the quill and ink light the fire of our cause.

      Not spared from the pain this creates, it is through the eyes of a saddened journalist like myself that I articulate this piece as a sequel to the one I previously wrote -- Racial Clowns In Our July 4th Celebration -- that appeared in numerous Internet publications and affiliates.

       If you knock at the door of the heart of this journalist to see what ticks inside, let me unbolt this portal and lead you to an open secrecy:  Both whetted and honed by the school of development journalism, my wife and I have been writers before and after we met. Our zeal in writing and seal in writing style are almost identical, although she left the grind for motherhood and home-making for a big family we raised, years back when I started to work in the United Nations.

      A vicious mind may misinterpret this as a kind of ego- massaging. This is kilometric farther from the truth, from nothing but the truth.  At this late, I have completed my life’s journey through the Cavalry and carnival of laurels and thorns, more than enough to celebrate my celibacy to self-praise, perhaps even more than eunuchs celebrate their immunity to lasciviousness and promiscuity in the temple of self-adulation and worship.  

      The purpose for turning the pages of time back to this road of life in journalism is to highlight the oddity of what I am writing about that leaves you at least incredulous if not aghast of disbelief why on July 4th, instead of being deliriously ecstatic like some of our millions of Independence Day celebrants, I grieve after witnessing the macabre way “patriots” use freedom of expressions – and that is shockingly expressed in the most vitriolic manner one can imagine, to achieve a spiteful end -- when we are supposed to honor, not denigrate, our heroes on Independence Day.

      You have probably just listened to left-leaning fanatical lovers of freedom as well as political sharks in and out of Capitol Hills in their worst bias, specifically in denouncing our soldiers in Iraq and in demonizing the president of the United States calling them war criminals, which no doubt make terrorists celebrate this nation’s July 4th pain-in-the-neck. This bane of our today’s existence gives the dark warriors of Islamic jihad a great psychological aid and comfort in their resolve to murder more Americans, nuclear bomb our cities and blow up the whole of America to smithereens!

     The black angels of death have a joyful celebration of July 4th when barely a month ago the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a chimpanzee swing vote granting terrorists detained in Guantanamo prison camps, constitutional right to the writ of habeas corpus, to be free and kill again while on trial or awaiting trial.

     Just barely a week ago, the FBI issued a nationwide alert that terrorists are in the process of detonating a “dirty bomb”, either nuclear or biological that would annihilate thousands if not millions of Americans. Thus expect the greatest bang of death when terror celebrates its own version of our July 4th spectacle of fireworks and explosions.

     From one journalist to another, my wife’s whispering comment over the shoulder as I text into my computer a noticeable deluge of lament and disapproval, was that I am one of the few if perhaps not the only one across the land today that she knows who celebrates July 4th with a mix of jubilant and mournful concerns.  

     And this is the way I celebrate this 4th of July: To our soldiers who put their lives on the line so that we may live in freedom, I bow my head in silence. Without a word or sound, a deep prayer flows out of my heart and mind. To ascribe to them the pinnacle of heroism and the highest acme of patriotism is never enough.  Thus I am deeply hurt when political assassins and their hired guns assassinate their resolve to fight, and murder what they are fighting for, more so when the modus operandi is done in public while the dollar-crazed Media circle the sky like vultures for the kill, and that’s when the heavens are heaviest with sadness, and teardrops fall.

     So to celebrate July 4th, my literary mood swing is in the following order: A toast to our heroes in the warfront, a prescription of Valium to their attackers so that they will stay calm and clear the streets and websites of political diatribes and wastes; to the delirious Media and wayward journalists involved in a feeding frenzy over the Downing St. memo that seriously maligned the United States and the president of the United States for this country’s decision to go to war in Iraq, I donate a copper rod for lightning to strike, and finally, to the myopia of unsympathetic guardians of human rights that gives terrorists a shot in the arm for more terror, a cup of black herbal tea for sympathy.

     Let’s sample the agony that explains why teardrops fall on July 4th  for this journalist. Attackers did it last year, the years before, and they are still doing it now.  It started in Abu Ghraib when American soldiers were called “murderers” and macabre voices from the print and the tube came out loud and clear not only urging that the president of the United States should be impeached but also demanding that the President be tried in the international court of justice as a war criminal. The gravity if not incongruity of the accusation is frightening because as we engage Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in this war on terror, it strikes right at the heart of our will to survive.

     Furthermore, except for a blatant display of emotional outburst, it is hard to make a sense out of it. But let’s warp back for a second look at this mean-spirited public crucifixion of our soldiery.  The angry protest refers to the alleged Abu Ghraib prison abuses committed by American soldiers on Iraqi terrorist detainees and Al Qaeda prisoners in a detention camp out there in the middle of nowhere west of Baghdad .

       In case you might want to recall, Abu Ghraib prison is where Saddam Hussein ’s Gestapo used to torture Iraqi prisoners. To many Iraqis, just the sight of this site triggers a nostalgia of repression and hate.   

     Anti-Saddam Hussein western Media have been addicted to covering and exposing anything that happens in this prison camp, Abu Ghraib being symbolic of inhuman monstrosity and evil, which is news to bloodhounds. Media have only eyes on whoever is using this camp, and whoever uses it must be, like Saddam Hussein, evil.  

         That perception is bad luck to our military in Abu Ghraib .  Media reports of abuses with damning photographs showing American soldiers committing alleged “atrocities” were reported to have been obtained by Guardian and New Yorker publications. Since then, street marchers and the radical world press went high wire with different visions and versions of what was happening in Abu Ghraib .  For political expediency, the truth was cannibalized.

      The worst media insight over the central theme of indignities was fraught with philosophical rationality yet displayed a kind of short-mindedness too visible to ignore. The spin was out of control.

      For instance, a televised Hollywood striptease turned street orator on July 4th – a tribute to beatniks of the 60s -- bellyached about our lack of love and full of hate as we pursue terrorists across the globe.  The clever rhetoric that Media played -- typical of anti-Bush vocalist Bono’s political concert -- was that we may not be able to fight terrorism with love, but hate will not make us win this war. When the protesting Liberals orchestrated this musical mayhem in public, the lyric was sonorous it held the gullible public spellbound.

     The oblique shot was that we declared this war against terror only for the simple reason that we hate terrorists.  That we should love them so that we can win this shapeless war sounds to me as if it is coming from the bowels of hell.

     This is similar to how some warrior liberal Christian priests use their priesthood to smother the gullible to virtual asphyxiation softly when they preach the gospel of love in blood. 

     And this folly of lies, is hell-bent.  Look, if love were the key to defeat terrorism, wouldn’t our undisputed compassion for mankind all over the world as we deliver gigantic aids, liberate lives from hopelessness and misery, have stopped the occurrence of that 9/11 infamy?  But in spite of that love only we Americans could give, New York was blown up, and Americans were brutally humiliated, mutilated and mass murdered.

       Our some six thousand defeats in terms of human lives in New York and Washington, D.C. when this war on terror began in American soil because of love and tolerance of other peoples’ beliefs and way of life, were buried under the rubbles following that 9/11 treacherous  attacks. It tells us that it was not because of lack of love why we were attacked on 9/11, but because we have in fact too much of love to share with others who mistake it as this nation’s weakness.         

       This temporary triumph of terrorists and terrorism does not include an assessment of our incalculable economic losses.  Put on top of it too, the mental and psychological devastation inflicted on all Americans, which is incapable of monetary estimation. 

      The terror that struck us was so life-defining it radically changed our way of life, and costing us more lives and fortune which even our unborn yet to come have to pay.

        The national trauma of terrorist attacks are so invasive that to trust the enemies of freedom was once a benevolent thought but now scraped off the bottom of the barrel.  And here are those in our midst short of intellectual breath whose light of reason is dimmed by personal and political conveniences, who want us to throw flowers to terrorists in return for catching their bullets.  In fair play, particularly in sports, that is not just Mike Tyson biting the ears in the middle of the ring, but throwing a left below the belt of his fouled victim that could send a cow down to the canvas – no brainer at all, just pure rage. 

       Indeed, this kind of argument posited by hardcore liberals who, like chameleons are pretending to be soft, is terribly misplaced.  If the attacking liberal beatniks meant that we should love terrorists who cut us down without mercy, in order to win the war against terror, then this idiotic cynicism ceases to be a laughing matter and should merit a serious national concern.

       The Calvary of this nation is to love, help and redeem other people from the clutches of tyrants the likes of Balkan Hitler Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and the Butcher of Baghdad Saddam Hussein.  In return for this labor of love is the Cross we carry on our shoulders, to which the enemies of freedom crucify us exactly how Christ was crucified at, because we have darn much too much of it.

       While we are celebrating the 4th of July and our fighting men and women in uniform stationed in Iraq are pictured as monsters because of what happened in the Abu Ghraib prison, I am now painfully thinking of four Americans years back burned, dismembered, killed and hung from a bridge in Iraq . 

        I was also numbly thinking of terrorist victim Daniel Pearl getting his throat cut and beheaded in front of the camera for the whole world to see.  We didn’t see photos of those American soldiers already dead in combat whose genitals were mutilated and their heads shot several times by terrorists whose comrades in arms were caught and detained in Abu Ghraib.  In Guantanamo , the beasts are out, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court for freeing them via habeas corpus, to kill again.

       I should not recommend thinking more of this outrage for fear of being emotionally overwhelmed. The heart would be weighed down with a stumping protest even as it let out an outcry of condemnation and contempt.  At the same time, the heart is heavy with sorrow that causes teardrops to fall.

       In fairness, I then think of the humiliation that Iraqi and Al Qaeda terrorist prisoners and detainees claimed to have suffered in the hands of the American soldiers who wanted to extract information from them in order to save lives -- indignities which the marching champions of freedom and Islamic terrorists considered a disgrace to the Iraqis linked to Al Qaeda and the underground. 

       They protested that such brutality deliberately portrayed in pictures and published, was a total insult that harmed the sensibility of the Arab world.  Media overplayed the enemies’ mortal and spiritual objections that such indecent exposure violated the respect of their established customs and tradition, as well as debased the moral foundation of their religion and religious belief.

      Let’s politely remind them that we are at war, which Islamic terror started, and perhaps this may help them out of a terrible amnesia and myopia:  The meaning of what happened in Abu Ghraib should be clearly understood.  It means that we finally learned the harsh realities of war against terror – and that is, we are no longer throwing flowers to those who are aspiring to cut our throat, or planning to bomb our buildings and kill our children and thousands of innocent civilians, nor are we now simply shaking hands and embracing in friendship those who cut the genitals of our soldiers before they shoot them dead and hang them by the bridge. Not anymore! 

     I just happen to think that such animalistic savagery perpetrated on us as an act of war, is not only an outrage to our American values but also a curse to mankind which the free world must endeavor by all means to wipe out from the face of the earth.

    The nerves of those street-marching advocates of misplaced freedom and their bestial disciples of terror, for calling our men and women in uniform serving in Iraq, monsters, when they are squeezed of intelligence information that we critically needed to save lives. Jihad’s disciples of terror take offense when we stung the sensitivity of their own Islamic values in war, yet oblivious to how we felt of their savagery when they brutalized ours.

     I must keep on reminding Americans of terror’s stupidity in public debates on this damning issue.  Terrorists are just killers, bereft of any intellectual grace.

     And also to remind terror’s supporters from the extreme left, that their out-of-bound advocacy of liberty and human rights over the dead bodies of fallen Americans in this war on terror, is a grave insult to our historic July 4th celebration of freedom and independence that makes our forebears squirm in their grave.

      Celebrating Independence Day by mauling the president of the United States for this alleged mistake in invading Iraq – which was more than 90% right at the time of the invasion -- is more idiotic than patriotic.  Assume that Saddam Hussein was not linked to that 9/11 outrage.  Because of 9/11, liberals accused the Commander-In-Chief of culpable indiscretion, that when we marched to Iraq to take down Saddam Hussein , we were no longer defending our country against terrorists but we were just seeking revenge.

        Revenge?  There are a thousand ways of philosophizing our purpose in Iraq .  One of them is revenge -- to some people who could hardly envision the foreboding message of our peril in the hands of international terrorists.

        If Bush did not act in the wake of 9/11, my criticism of such terrible omission as an unforgivable error would be more than a fair comment that should merit a banner story. But just the same -- the fact that he acted the way he did, which in the election precincts such action majority of the American public approved  [won his 2nd term], should serve notice to terrorists and their Supreme Ct backed supporters, that Al Qaeda killers in this war on terror, are hunted down like animals they deserved, wherever they are, or in whichever part of the world they may hide.

       Once again, we remind the enemy within that this nation’s determined mobilization of national defense and security forces nationwide, coupled with Washington’s timely decision to go to war in Iraq, created a moratorium of terrorist attacks as this mobilized nation put terrorists on the run since 9/11 up to this present celebration of July 4th 2008. 

      The time has come that this strongest and greatest nation on earth show the whole watching world that we are the only nicest friend one could find in friendship, but we are our adversary’s worst enemy as well.

      We must stop this brainless attack on our soldiers in Iraq . It is very unsightly let alone contradictory to some of us like this writer, for teardrops to fall while the rest celebrates with joyful abandon the hypnotic spell of our Independence Day. #

© Copyright Edwin A. Sumcad. NWS access July 01, 2008 .

The writer is an award-winning journalist. Go to NWS homepage, click on the columnist button to know more about the author or you may e-mail your comment at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

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