...all in the name of tolerance and multiculti

A couple of days ago, SPIEGEL ONLINE bemoaned the fate of, as they put it oh-so-delicately "Islamic extremist" with a German passport, Mohammed Haydar Zammar, who "has been locked in a dungeon in Damascus for the past four years as part of Washington's post-9/11 "extraordinary renditions" program. By placing the man with suspected ties to the Hamburg al-Qaida cell in Syrian hands, the United States is allowing Damascus to commit torture so that it doesn't have to."

Now it seems that officers from Bundeskriminalamt (federal office of criminal investigation) Verfassungsschutz (office for protection of the constitution) and Bundesnachrichtendienst (federal intelligence) interrogated Zammar in Damascus in November 2002 without the knowledge of either, foreign- and law ministry. The interrogation, so SPIEGEL ONLINE, was part of a deal between Syria and the chancellor's office.

Of course, that is all hard to swallow. But the hypocritical whining of the self-declared humanitarians from the left is even less palatable. Hans-Christian Ströbele, "Green" MP, is talking about a "dirty deal" because it might have turned the government into "accessories of the dirty part of he war against terror".

That would be the same Ströbele who, in 1991 already, justified the Iraqi rocket attacks on Israel as "logical, almost imperative, consequence of Israel's policy" yet was at the same time busy collecting money for "Weapons for Nicaragua" while Zammar was building up a terror cell in Hamburg, unhindered by any German authorities, all in the name of tolerance and multiculti.

Frankly, all that hypocrisy makes me want to throw up yesterday's breakfast and every time I watch the Islamic propaganda video of the beheading of Daniel Pearl I can't quite muster up much anger anymore about those terrorists become torture victims.

Daniel Pearl: Lest we forget!