Another good man killed by terrorists

I got tears in my eyes the other night when I saw Jennifer Griffin's Fox News report that Lebanese journalist and politician Gibran Tueni had been killed in a bombing in a Beirut suburb Monday.

Tueni had predicted that he would be a target of assassination attempts back in August. I blogged last March on an interview Griffin did with Tueni where he said:

Huge impact. A huge impact. (note: he is referring to President Bush's State of the Union address) You know, really, people felt very happy when President Bush was re-elected. Believe it or not, we had a headline that day which was on eight columns--one word--Bush. Like that. You know why? Simply because, we think that is the first time that an American president is speaking clearly about democracy and is serious about implementing democracy in the Middle East.

Really, the Lebanese were always cautious about the American policy in the Middle East. The Lebanese always thought that the Americans bartered them with the Syrians. Lebanese are still cautious and afraid that one day or another, you will have a Syrian/American agreement, you know, and Lebanese will pay the price.

What helped a lot also, I think, really, is that this is the first time that we felt that maybe we are not going to pay the price alone. Because at the time we were outspoken, but you were killed.

So, in the end Tueni did pay the price alone and was killed for what? For speaking out. For encouraging freedom. For calling for Syrian troop withdrawal.

He was not threatening a violent overthrow of the government. He wasn't recruiting suicide bombers. He was speaking out--voicing what many Lebanese were thinking. He was a 48-year-old father of four, including twin daughters a few months old.

Totalitarianism is the enemy of human freedom. Freedom is the God-given heritage of all people. Why have Americans suddenly become confused about this? Do we want to be on the side of people who yearn and struggle for freedom and self-determination? Or do we want to tacitly support dictators whose regimes suppress their people in order to amass personal wealth and power? What do we want to stand for? What heritage do we want to leave to our children?

In addition, the situation in Lebanon provides an interesting counter to the liberal argument that the U.S. presence in Iraq is a cause of the terrorist violence there. We are not in Lebanon. We were not in Beslan. What explains the violence going on in countries where we are not?

The bottom line is that evil exists. (Did Hitler just have a 'different perspective'?)

The bottom line is that it is futile to try to explain terrorism through a rational thought process. They are not just people with a different point of view, a la Chris Matthews:

If we stop trying to figure out the other side, we’ve given up. The person on the other side is not evil. They just have a different perspective.

Really, sometimes I am embarrassed to be an American.