It was interesting to see a group of Iraq war protesters gather at peace vigil outside Philadelphia City Hall Tuesday to observe the Iraq War milestone of 3,000 U.S. dead since the U.S. invasion on March 20, 2003.
It was one of many protests staged simultaneously around the country Tuesday by anti-war activists. The Philadelphia vigil was organized by a group called Brandywine Peace Community, based in affluent Chester County.
The vigil drew widespread coverage from the Philadelphia TV stations and newspapers.
I don't have a problem with remembering the men and women who sacrificed their lives for their country. And I don't have a problem with protesting the war. It's a free country. But I'm curious about a few things.
Why hasn't the Brandywine Peace Community staged a vigil for the nearly 2,000 shooting victims in Philadelphia during 2006? Why aren't these peace activists commemorating the deaths of 406 people murdered in Philadelphia in 2006?
Some may argue there is no comparison between U.S. citizens killed in battle and U.S. citizens gunned down on the streets of a major city. Why? Would the far left be protesting deaths in Iraq if Bill Clinton had started the war?
The murders in Philadelphia are a lot closer to home than the 3,000 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq over three years. Why isn't the peace group marching to the mayor's house or the governor's mansion in Harrisburg?
Why are Democratic Mayor John Street or Democratic District Attorney Lynne Abraham or Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell not being held accountable for the bloodshed in Philadelphia during their watch?
Why hasn't the Philadelphia news media asked some of these questions? The coverage of the carnage on the streets of Philadelphia is usually relegated to back pages of The Philadelphia Inquirer. On some days, the Inquirer didn't bother writing about a murder. It just ran a tally of victims in a small box, reducing the taking of another human life to a sports boxscore.
Just a few questions I have as I sit and ponder the perpetual riddle of liberal hypocrisy.
1 comment:
Rush picked this up this morning, but the numbers are pretty ridiculous.
First of all, last year there were over 15,000 murders in Iraq (that we know about)-- since you are comparing civilian deaths. This makes it far more violent population wise than Philadelphia or any other American city (and of course Iraq is like America-- there are good places and bad places so if you really want to get down to it then try comparing Baghdad or Ramadi to Philadelphia.)
If you want to limit your comparison to American troop deaths then you have to take it out of the population base of American troops in Iraq (last year's troop level averaged about 140,000). I calculated it out on my blog (linked linked here and determined that an average person from Philadelphia is over 20 times as likely to die if they join the military and go Iraq than if they stay at home in Philly.
But to calculate a statistic in which the numeator is the number of American troop deaths in Iraq and the denominator the civilian population of that country is a meaningless statistic, but that is in effect what the right has been guilty of for at least the past couple of years.
Either divide 15,000 by 26,000,000 (the civilian population of Iraq) or divide 821 by 140,000 (the subset of those persons in Iraq who are members of the U.S. military) but to be intellectually honest you must compare apples to apples.
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