Death of the peace-makers

When a determined group of Islamists calling themselves "Sword of righteousness" takes four western peace-makers captive and threatens to kill them unless all Iraqi political prisoners are released, you know that bad times are ahead. People comment on this abduction and say, "why take these men and women hostage, they are friends of the Arabs, they mean no harm." But, they are enemies of the Islamists precisely because they represent first a desire for peace, that the Islamists emphatically reject, and second they represent western interference in the Muslim World.
As Margaret Wente wrote recently in the Boston Globe & Mail: "A year ago, Iraqi terrorists kidnapped Margaret Hassan, the head of CARE International in Iraq. Ms. Hassan, who held British and Irish citizenship, had spent three decades working with the people of Iraq. She had an Iraqi husband, spoke fluent Arabic, and was an outspoken critic of the United Nations-imposed sanctions against Iraq. She was one of the best friends the Iraqi people ever had. But none of that mattered. Despite international appeals for mercy, the terrorists killed her anyway. That's what terrorists do."
The Islamists do not want peace, on the contrary they want a violent jihad, a war, against the forces of Zionism (Israel and the Jews) and against the US and its Western supporters (the UK and the rest of the EU). There are now slim pickings for hostage takers in Iraq, since most of the contract workers, naive "peaceniks," and interfering reporters have either been killed, captured or have beat a hasty retreat. So this previously unknown group has had to scrape the bottom of the barrel by taking these "professional" peace-makers, those do-gooders who float
around the periphery of conflicts hoping to persuade the protagonists to their views. There are two Canadians an American and a Brit.
Now a great deal of support has been garnered on behalf of the British hostage, Mr. Norman Kember, a retired professor, aged 74, who is a well-known opponent of the Iraq war and of war in general. He wants the British to withdraw their forces, and leave the Iraq Government to fight it out in a civil war with the insurgents unaided, since that would be the actual outcome of a western withdrawal. Since the predominant view of the left is the same as his, the left and their Muslim supporters in the UK are making strenuous efforts to persuade his kidnappers to pardon and release him. They even have former Muslim terrorists speaking out on his behalf (one formerly at Guantanamo and one in a British prison).
Because as far as the left in the UK and elsewhere are concerned their views are basically the same as those of the Muslim insurgents against the US and UK in Iraq, i.e. withdraw all western troops from Iraq. No imperialist occupation, leave Iraq for the Iraqis to fight it out, who cares if there will be massacres and blood-letting, followed by a civil war and development of another Saddam-style dictatorship.
Their political agenda, cloaked in the mantle of righteous peace-making, will not save the western hostages. The Islamists holding them want to make an example of them for two reasons, first to show that they are not in favor of peace with the western-dominated Iraqi regime, and second to show that they want no western influence in the Dar al-Islam (the Islamic Empire, as opposed to Dar al-Harb, the Empire of the Infidels). As far as they are concerned these "peace-makers" are infidels like all the rest of us. But, when the peace-makers are put to the sword, the future must appear bleak.