Two articles in the New
Two articles in the New York Times that I read back-to-back created a curious juxtaposition for me today. The first was about Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street reporter who was murdered with medieval glee by Muslim extremists. The second was about a baby named Jack.
Here we have Ahmed Omar Sheikh, partially educated in the West. Recruited at the age of 19 by the Pakistani-based Harkat ul-Mujahedeen, he was given an assignment to kidnap Westerners and hold them against the release of imprisoned Muslim extremists. He bungled it. Ahmed was arrested, and the hostages went free. Now, he’s bungled again. His Jaish-e-Mohammed cronies may have gotten Pearl to mumble their slogans, but they’ve killed their hostage, gained nothing, and created enough political will to root out the radical elements of the Pakistani intelligence services.
Which brings me to baby Jack. While still in utero, it was discovered that Jack’s aortic valve was constricted. If left untreated, he would have been born with a scarred and useless left ventricle, and faced death or a half-million dollars’ worth of risky surgery. Doctors went into his mother’s womb and operated on his grape-sized heart, expanding the faulty valve with a tiny balloon 1/8 of an inch across. Jack was born on February 21 in Boston, six weeks premature but with a healthy heart and an energetic disposition.
These are the kinds of things we can do here in America. While Muslim extremists behead Western newspaper reporters in a pathetic attempt to excuse the failures of their own society, Americans are performing life-saving surgeries on infants before they are even born.
