from OpinionJournal -

Addendum: But They Support the Troops!
The Christian Peacemaker Teams, whose appallingly ungrateful statement about the military rescue of three of their colleagues in Iraq we noted yesterday, last night added a new section called "Addenda," which includes this:

We have been so overwhelmed and overjoyed to have Jim, Harmeet and Norman freed, that we have not adequately thanked the people involved with freeing them, nor remembered those still in captivity. So we offer these paragraphs as the first of several addenda:

We are grateful to the soldiers who risked their lives to free Jim, Norman and Harmeet. As peacemakers who hold firm to our commitment to nonviolence, we are also deeply grateful that they fired no shots to free our colleagues.

Yesterday's Orlando Sentinel, published before the hostages' release, carried a letter to the editor from CPT's Kathleen Kern, which reinforces the argument we made yesterday, namely that CPT views America as the root of all evil:

I am writing as a grieving colleague of Tom Fox in response to Cal Thomas' March 14 column, "The Tom Fox tragedy."

We do not believe that "evil people will be nice to us if we are nice to them." We do believe that Jesus meant what he said when he told his followers, "But love your enemies, do good and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked." (Luke 6:35)

Christian Peacemaker Teams agrees with Cal Thomas when he says, "Evil cannot be accommodated. Evil must be defeated if peace on Earth is to exist."

We strive with all our might to fight the evil that says it is acceptable to bomb and torture people, that some lives are worth more than others, that we can ignore what Jesus said about treating "the least of these" as we would treat him.

But a reader who asks to remain anonymous says their theology can be more easily explained than we did:

It does not "equate America as the root of all evil and America's adversaries as Edenic creatures--innocents who know not good or evil and thus bear no culpability for their bad actions." Instead, it stems from the view that we are not morally responsible for our enemy's acts but for our own, and that the good Christian suffers all manner of evil (lest his love for his neighbor be stained) when it is that good Christian's own welfare that is at stake, but suffers no manner of evil to befall his neighbor when yet another neighbor would commit harm against him.

The application of this traditional Christian moral viewpoint leads to turning the other cheek in some purely self-regarding situations, and to the use of force in other-regarding situations. To the outsider, Christian "just war" theory is easily caricatured as an inconsistent waffling between "pacifism" and "bellicism," but in fact it is neither.

In the present case, the CPT seems to have concluded that Christian love requires turning the other cheek always. ("Just war pacifism" is not unknown in the history of Christian ethics.) This is a kind of rejection of responsibility for the neighbor who is unjustly harmed by yet another neighbor, or of the possibility that using force will prevent a greater evil. But it is not as strange as you make it out to be