Birmingham Church bombings, Iraq 'insurgency' and the media.

A Powerline post reminds us of the Church bombings of 42 years ago, and points to:
NT TImes: Rice Pays Homage to Victims of Church Bombing

"As God would have it, they were at Sunday school when America experienced homegrown terrorists of the worst sort," Ms. Rice said in an emotional ceremony at a park across the street from the church, which was bombed in 1963. In her speech, she sought to connect her childhood in the segregated South to her work as the first African-American woman to be the nation's top diplomat.

"It was meant to shatter our spirit," she said of the bombing. "It was meant to say that we shouldn't rise up. Just a few weeks after Dr. Martin Luther King said, 'I have a dream,' it was meant to tell us that, no, we didn't have a dream, and that dream was going to be denied."

Then as now in Iraq, the atrocities of killing innocents are meant to dispirit and bring fear. Now as then, these will fail.

But there is a vast difference.

Then, there were no excuses made for the bombers in the media. There was no attempt to blame the government for 'inspiring' these bombings by means of the Civil Rights Act of 64. No calls to roll back forced integration as in Little Rock... Or for nationalizing the Guard....no Hollywood and Entertainmment apologists for Maddox, Faubus and George Wallace.

Imagine our outrage were it so.

And imagine if just a few papers and magazines and public figures were have to come out in support of the Klan and Segregationists... can you imagine that they might be emboldened to repeat such cowardly acts? I can.

Naturally these media and celebrities would couch their outrageous views in terms of "cultural" and "religious" differences from the rest of America. Would, at the least, view with sympathy these acts in relation to the old south seeing the end of a "way of Life".
Of course, if some did that, they would have to overlook the various lynchings and assassinations that came before and were yet to come.

But in the end reason and freedom won... as it will in Iraq. But this time, for Iraqi's, it will come at a much higher price.

And the irony of just who it was that made it so difficult and bloody by encouraging the terror killers will not be lost in the lessons of history.