RUTHFULLY YOURS

The presumed Islamic State murder victim Kayla Mueller isn’t quite the saintly martyr that President Obama and the media are trying to make Americans believe.

Family and friends told reporters Mueller was “a deeply idealistic young woman eager to help those less fortunate.” A neighbor of hers, a 66-year-old Vietnam veteran, said Mueller “represented everything good about being an American. In the outgoing battle between good and evil, she represented the best of the good. She took great risks to help other people.”

Fresh from the golf course, President Obama praised Mueller effusively, saying she was “the best of America,” and adding that she “worked with humanitarian organizations in India, Israel, and the Palestinian territories, compelled by her desire to serve others.” Kayla’s “compassion and dedication to assisting those in need shows us that even amongst unconscionable evil, the essential decency of humanity can live on.”

Only someone with Obama’s twisted, pro-Islamist perspective could lie so passionately on Mueller’s behalf.

It turns out the 26-year-old Islamic State hostage killed last week in Syria wasn’t many of the things her supporters described her as.

Mueller wasn’t a humanitarian aid worker. She wasn’t a peace activist. She wasn’t trying to make things better for everyone in the Middle East. She was part of the problem, an ally with medieval theocratic totalitarians against Western civilization.

Mueller was an Islamic terrorist sympathizer who worked for the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which certainly is not a humanitarian organization. The ISM is a terrorist-linked organization that attempts to sabotage the anti-terrorism activities of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The ISM backs the enemies of Israel, including Hamas, and those in the Palestinian Authority who seek to destroy Israel.

The ISM said Mueller “worked with Palestinians nonviolently resisting the confiscation and demolitions of their homes and lands.”

Mueller falsely accused the IDF of atrocities and boasted in Internet posts that she participated in anti-Israel demonstrations and supported Palestinians hurling rocks at Israelis, which she regarded as a “nonviolent” act. As she saw it, Israelis were oppressors and Palestinians were heroic victims. In a October 2010 pro-terrorist screed she emoted:

Oppression greets us from all angles. Oppression wails from the soldiers radio and floats through tear gas clouds in the air. Oppression explodes with every sound bomb and sinks deeper into the heart of the mother who has lost her son. But resistance is nestled in the cracks in the wall, resistance flows from the minaret 5 times a day and resistance sits quietly in jail knowing its time will come again. Resistance lives in the grieving mother’s wails and resistance lives in the anger at the lies broadcasted across the globe. Though it is sometimes hard to see and even harder sometimes to harbor, resistance lives. Do not be fooled, resistance lives.

Such words “are not that of a humanitarian aid worker, but of a propagandist for the supporters of worldwide jihad who seek Israel’s destruction,” Ron Radosh writes at PJ Media. Mueller was at best a useful idiot of Hamas, he argues, comparing Mueller to the late Rachel Corrie, another ISM activist.

Corrie became a leftist cause celebre after she died as a result of her own foolishness. She was inadvertently killed while she was obstructing the work of an IDF bulldozer as it was destroying the entrance to a tunnel used for smuggling weapons to be used against Israeli forces.

“The ISM placed Corrie in a dangerous situation, and falsely told the world that Israel’s IDF had purposefully killed her in order to scare off foreigners coming to aid the Palestinian people,” Radosh notes.

Mueller too was used by the ISM for political purposes, he argues.

The tragedy of Kayla Mueller’s life is that out of an idealistic urge to do good, she went to work on behalf of supporters of terrorism and violence who believe openly in a revolutionary route to salvation. Like so many others, back in the United States she fell prey to the overtures of leftist revolutionaries, who are adept at using the aims of young and innocent students who yearn only to build a better world. In taking that path, she died on behalf of those who believe in violence and world-wide revolution, beginning with the destruction of Israel.

The ISM sends its activists onto battlefields and other hotspots to serve as cannon fodder. Its leaders are delighted when an ISM member is killed in action because then the group can use the death for propaganda purposes.

Dead foreigners are especially treasured. As ISM leader George S. Rishmawi has said,

“When Palestinians get shot by Israeli soldiers, no one is interested anymore. But if some of these foreign volunteers get shot or even killed, then the international media will sit up and take notice.”

Mueller is not the first Islamist-sympathizing American to die at the hands of the Islamic State. James W. Foley, who was beheaded by IS in August, fancied himself a journalist but did little more than parrot Islamist propaganda. He mocked the Global War on Terror, urged that Sunni Islamist rebels be armed against the Assad regime, and supported terrorists’ efforts to drive out the Christians of Aleppo.

Foley and Mueller were on the same wavelength. They were both fighting in their own ways for Islamic totalitarianism and both met gruesome ends at the hands of the Islamic State.

Perhaps their bad examples will discourage future Americans from throwing their lot in with those who would snuff out Western civilization.