Time Immortal

And on this, the second most solemn day of the year for Catholics, his thoughts are drawn to the two women recently used as carriers for reomtely-detonated bombs by al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq.

Down’s people can be extremely suggestible. They are like children, in many respects, and especially, trusting like small children, even as adults. As the father of a Down’s child myself, I can tell you just how innocent they are, and how loving. God made them without guile, and utterly in need of our protection. And in return for that demand upon our decency (Down’s children in Canada today are usually aborted), He made them a light in this world. O Lord.

Yet the truth is, that the use of the mentally disabled to carry explosives — and of children, too — is a standard Islamist practice in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, and elsewhere. So in this respect, too, the bombings at al-Ghazil and New Baghdad were nothing new. An even stranger truth, is that the Al Qaeda terrorists are human, like us. Like their victims. Like the two Down’s ladies.

Today is an international day of mourning, and it is because we are fully human that we need to wear the ashes on our brow.

It is interesting, the contrast drawn. One one hand, we have the very visible and very open barbarity of Islamist men using these mentally handicapped women — as naive and as trusting as they likely were, in their almost childlike way — as unwitting instruments of mayhem, death, and destruction. On the other hand, we have the silent and undiscussable barbarity of “choice”, the death sentence of abortion that we in the supposedly enlightened West inflict upon those unborn children who are found to be with ‘defect.’

The Reader will know that I’m not one for moral equivalence or “we’re just like the terrorists” thinking, but in this way I think we are every bit as horrible as those men of al-Qaeda who orchestrated the plan that killed a hundred people, and maimed hundreds more, in two Iraqi marketplaces just recently. They, like far too many of us, saw the disabled not as persons, but as things to be used and/or disposed of — or both.