Compassionate conservatism

Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig, two Fox News correspondents who were kidnapped by a Gaza-based Islamist group, were recently released, but only after their captors forcibly converted them to Islam on camera at gunpoint.

Initially, many conservative bloggers denounced these kidnappings and expressed their support for these reporters. They also vented their anger against anti-Fox News biased liberals who they accused of feeling that the men deserved to be kidnapped. But once the correspondents were released after their conversion to Islam, it was a different story. On their return to America, the reporters received a cold reception from the conservative block, even from those who had previously cried rivers of tears on their behalf.

The reason for this bizarre change of heart? The extraordinary cowardice these men had displayed in submitting, at gun point, to renouncing Christ their faith. Many conservative bloggers even said that in the hypothetical event of themselves being in a similar situation, the hypotheticalness exacerbated by the fact that most of these bloggers will have very few opportunities to encounter battlezone conditions outside of JC Penney post-Thanksgiving sales, they would prefer death to religious conversion. Others claimed that the West's war against militant Islam had suffered a severe blow due to this rather wimpish capitulation of Western reporters to their Muslim captors. Of course, none of these critics actually had a gun pointing to their head as they wrote their brave screed, so it is difficult to know whether they would actually have followed up on their promise of choosing "de-capitation over capitulation" in reality.

Jon Swift, an amazing satirist whose blog I've recently discovered, brilliantly tears all these faux warriors to shreds as he points out the rare courage it takes for a conservative behind a keyboard to defend Christianity and Western values by fearlessly defying the threat of a gun pointed at someone else's head.