The Refugees We Helped Create

A reader writes:

The mostly Sunni Arab population of western and northern Iraq is faced with a diabolical choice between the brutal rule of IS and the even more murderous rule of their own government. Their life and death predicament is the direct result of past and present U.S. policy in Iraq. In 2004, the U.S. responded to resistance in Iraq with a “divide and rule” strategy that relied heavily on recruiting, training and deploying Special Police commandos to detain, torture and summarily execute tens of thousands of young men and boys in areas that resist the illegal U.S. invasion and occupation of their country. At its peak in 2006, this genocidal campaign delivered over 1,600 corpses per month to the morgue in Baghdad. The killing wound down along with U.S. combat operations in 2008, but leaders of the Badr Brigade militia retained control of the Interior Ministry and their campaign of detention, torture and extrajudicial execution continued, albeit on a smaller scale. As Iraq’s political crisis has exploded in the last year or two, the Interior Ministry has relaunched its death squads with a vengeance, leaving Iraqis in a large swathe of the country caught between IS and the death squads. After all they have suffered for the past 12 years, it is a rational choice for them to see IS as the lesser evil. 

This is the sort of thing John Zmirak calls “inconveniences” while he brandishes the unborn as human shields, declares Catholic social teaching a “myth“, takes a page from the Planned Parenthood handbook to denounce the bishops and the Pope as “tax-exempt celibates” and acts as court prophet for Trumpkin nativist cruelty to the desperate refugees we have done so very much to create.

How has this grotesque parody of the Catholic faith achieved acceptance by so wide a swath of Catholics who profess to reject cafeteria Catholicism?

Thanks be to God for Pope Francis!