Senator Durbin’s Humanitarian Concern Stops at Abortion Clinic Door 
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by Robert Knight
June 22, 2005
LifeNews.com Note: Robert Knight is director of the Culture & Family Institute, an affiliate of Concerned Women for America. This article first appeared on WorldNetDaily on June 18. Durbin has since apologized forthe remarks he made.
In 2003, when the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly to ban the barbaric “procedure" known as partial-birth abortion, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) voted “nay."
Earlier, Durbin had tried to scam the Senate with an amendment that would have left the door wide open for doctors to justify virtually any abortion. After his ruse failed, he voted against the final bill, which passed 64-33.
This is the same Sen. Durbin who on Tuesday, June 14, compared personnel at the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay to “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime – Pol Pot and others—that had no concern for human beings."
The senator’s humanitarian impulse toward terror suspects seems curious, given his efforts to protect abortionists’ “right" to pull fully formed children out of the womb up to their necks, pierce their skulls, suck out their brains, and extract the dead bodies.
There is no plausible medical reason to justify this cruelty. In 1996, more than 600 physicians, including former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, issued this statement: “Never is the partial-birth abortion procedure medically indicated." Not to save the life of the mother, nor to protect the health of the mother. By the time you get to virtually birthing the child, there is no excuse to kill him or her.
The American Medical Association concurred, and endorsed the legislative ban that Sen. Durbin couldn’t bring himself to support. To what we can only assume was to Sen. Durbin’s relief, a federal judge in Nebraska struck the law down within an hour after President Bush signed it on Nov. 5, 2003.
As for Sen. Durbin’s comparisons of our guys to the bad guys, here’s some perspective: The Nazis killed upwards of 9 million people in their death camps. Nearly 3 million perished in the Soviet gulag, along with another 100 million total worldwide victims of communism, as documented in the Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, by Stephane Courtois, et al.
Cambodian dictator Pol Pot is in a category of his own, beginning with his order to kill anyone wearing eyeglasses lest they read dissenting literature, and ending with 2 million murdered in that small country.
Now, everyone makes mistakes. Mr. Durbin might have been carried away after hearing about some of the techniques used to break the terror suspects, such as playing loud rap music, making them stand naked, lowering the temperature, and so on. But so far, not one prisoner at Guantanamo has perished, nor has any suffered any permanent physical harm. It’s not exactly like life in Pol Pot’s “tiger cages," where prisoners suffered horrible tortures before succumbing to death.
Given a chance to apologize for his remarks after being rebuked on the Senate floor, Durbin stuck to his guns.
"This administration should apologize to the American people for abandoning the Geneva Conventions and authorizing torture techniques that put our troops at risk and make Americans less secure," Durbin said Wednesday.
I picked up Durbin’s quote off the Aljazeera Network. Sen. Durbin’s remarks are getting around the Islamic world, and are no doubt being used to stoke even more hatred against America. If even a U.S. senator describes us as operating like the Nazis, any measure can be justified, including flying commercial airliners into buildings and killing thousands, or sending teen-aged girls strapped with bombs into crowded cafes.
In an interview, I once compared the late sex researcher Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele because of Kinsey’s complicity in the rape of hundreds of children in the name of science. After some stinging rebukes from Holocaust victims’ family members, who reminded me that Mengele had presided over torture-murders too hideous to describe here, I issued an apology. The Mengele comparison, I said, was out of line. Kinsey was a perverse, bad guy, but not in Mengele’s league.
Sen. Durbin has given aid and comfort to our enemies, smeared good Americans, and implicitly minimized the scope of the crimes against millions committed by the totalitarian regimes he cited.
It’s never too late to do the right thing. Mr. Durbin might want to apologize first to the slain babies’ mothers and fathers who realized later what a hideous crime had been committed on their son or daughter. He might also want to issue an apology for his latest remarks before he faces the embarrassment of actually meeting a family member of our slandered agents or perhaps a relative of one of our troops killed trying to spare this nation and the world any more terror.
