"Immoral
equivalency"
"Then young men broke my glasses, began smashing stones into my face and head.... And even then, I understood. I couldn't blame them for what they were doing.... If I was an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdullah, I would have done just what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find." (Robert Fisk)
News and commentary on moral equivalence and moral relativism.
Part 1: 2001/09/12 - 2001/12/24
Part 2: 2002/01/18 - 2002/06/28
Part 3: 2002/07/08 - 2002/08/28
Part 4: 2002/09/04 - 2002/10/31
Part 5: 2002/11/06 -December 2001
"New York: a tale of two cities" (John Ibbitson, The Globe and Mail, 2001/12/24)
"Non-Judgment Day at Yale" (Michael Kelly, The Washington Post, 2001/12/19)
"The grapes of wrath" (Mark Steyn, The Spectator, from the 2001/12/15 issue)
"My beating by refugees is a symbol of the hatred and fury of this filthy war" (Robert Fisk, Independent, 2001/12/10)
"The cycle of absurdity" (Michael Freund, The Jerusalem Post, 2001/12/05)
November 2001
"American academics get it wrong, again" (Helle Bering, The Washington Times, 2001/11/28)
"Idiocy Watch: Special Norman Mailer Edition" (The News Republic, 2001/11/20)
"Watch out, bin Laden, the West is winning" (Tom Utley, The Daily Telegraph, 2001/11/12)
"Holocaust denial comes to Knoxville..." (Glenn Reynolds, InstaPundit.Com, 2001/11/08)
"War Support Ebbs Worldwide - Sept. 11 Doesn't Justify Bombing, Many Say" (Kevin Sullivan, The Washington Post, 2001/11/07)
"Chomsky Attacks U.S. Double Standards on Terrorism" (tehrantimes.com, 2001/11/06)
"Earth to Ivory Tower: Get Real!" (Kay S. Hymowitz and Harry Stein, The Wall Street Journal, 2001/11/05)
"Idiocy Watch #9" (The New Republic, 2001/11/01)
October 2001
"Elitist contempt for American values" (Walter Williams, TownHall, 2001/10/31)
"Israel and the FO" (The Daily Telegraph, 2001/10/26)
"'Brutality smeared in peanut butter'" (Arundhati Roy, The Guardian, 2001/10/23)
"The view from the mosque: the Taliban are not all that bad" (The Observer, 2001/10/21)
"Questions for the Anti-War Crowd, Part II - What if someone took them seriously?" (Michael Long, Jewish World Review, 2001/10/19)
"Idealising the other side" (Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Guardian, 2001/10/19)
"The New Cold War" (David Pryce-Jones, National Review, 2001/10/17)
"Idiocy Watch #5" (The New Republic, 2001/10/17)
"Kumbaya Watch: Kingsolver, Again" (Ross Douthat, National Review, 2001/10/16)
"Koran and Country" (BBC News/Panorama, 2001/10/14)
"Islam 'hijacked' by terror" (Kate Goldberg, BBC News, 2001/10/11)
"Even Pacifists Must Support This War" (Scott Simon, The Wall Street Journal, 2001/10/11)
"City Council Fails to Consider Resolution to Denounce Violence" (The Daily Californian, 2001/10/10)
"Kumbaya Watch: Feminists for the Taliban" (Ross Douthat, National Review, 2001/10/05)
"Not Ready for Prime Time: Peaceniks" (James P. Pinkerton, Los Angeles Times, 2001/10/02)
"The Best and the Brightest" (The Wall Street Journal, 2001/10/02)
September 2001
"The algebra of infinite justice" (Arundhati Roy, The Guardian, 2001/09/29)
"The fascist sympathies of the soft left" (Christopher Hitchens, The Spectator, 2001/09/29)
"U.S. just as guilty of committing own violent acts" (Robert Jensen, HoustonChronicle, 2001/09/26)
"And our flag was still there" (Barbara Kingsolver, San Francisco Chronicle, 2001/09/25)
"The Clash of Ignorance" (Edward W. Said, The Nation, 2001/09/22)
"Excusing Terror - The Politics of Ideological Apology" (Michael Walzer, The American Prospect, 2001/09/22)
"Blaming the U.S., whitewashing terror" (National Post, 2001/09/19)
"The End of Innocence" (Joel Rogers, The Nation, 2001/09/17)
"On the Bombings" (Noam Chomsky, zmag.org, 2001/09/16)
"Islam and the West are inadequate banners" (Edward Said, The Observer, 2001/09/16)
"Fear & Loathing in America" (Hunter S. Thompson, ESPN.com, 2001/09/12)
"New York: a tale of two cities" (John Ibbitson, The Globe and Mail, 2001/12/24)
"There are those who argue that we need to get past this, past these 3,000 horrid deaths, that we need to gain some perspective. There are larger issues, they say, issues of what they claim is America's complicity in the disaster, of wrong horses backed, right ones ignored. They argue, passionately, that we need to concentrate, instead, on the innocents killed in the Afghan campaign, which they say is an evil at least as great as that of the terrorist attacks. Some of them go far. John McMurtry, a professor of philosophy at Guelph University, recently delivered an address at the University of Toronto in which he claimed that the American and coalition response to the attacks was simply "the latest expression of a deeper and wider terrorist campaign of an emergent totalitarian pattern of instituting world corporate rule." Comparing Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to President George W. Bush and the American government, he said "there is little difference in moral substance between these atavistic gangs. Both are mass killers." And he suggested that "the evidence confirming U.S. and allied security awareness of, and possible complicity in, the 9/11 attack is considerable." He also doesn't like professional sport.""Non-Judgment Day at Yale" (Michael Kelly, The Washington Post, 2001/12/19)
"Hornstein is a student at Yale University, and she has written a column for the Dec. 17 issue of Newsweek in which she attempts to come to terms with what for her and her friends at Yale is the most troublesome question arising out of Sept. 11: Did somebody do something really bad here? ... Hornstein is clear as to why she and her peers find it so difficult to judge: They were trained all their lives to be this way. Hornstein spent 14 years in a public school in Manhattan "with students who came from a variety of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds" being tutored in an "open-minded curriculum." ... In high school, Hornstein and her fellow students agreed that although they personally found the practice of female genital mutilation to be abhorrent, they must accept it as part of the culture of other societies.""The grapes of wrath" (Mark Steyn, The Spectator, from the 2001/12/15 issue)
"Robert Fisk of the Independent nicely captured the likely fate of the apologists, not in anything he wrote (he's been pretty much wrong on everything since September) but in the simple act of getting beaten up by the people he’s championed for so long. His column on the lessons to be drawn from his savage assault by disaffected Afghans was a gem of self-parody: Then young men broke my glasses, began smashing stones into my face and head.... And even then, I understood. I couldn't blame them for what they were doing.... If I was an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdullah, I would have done just what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find. It's not their fault; their "brutality is entirely the product of others": i.e., us. Mr Fisk is the quintessential New Racist. He believes that, while he and Bush are sophisticated human beings who should be held accountable for their actions, the Noble Savage (and no one’s done more to ennoble him than Fisk) should be offered moral absolution for assaulting a civilian on no other basis than his ethnic identity. As Salman Rushdie has said, this denies 'the basic idea of all morality: that individuals are responsible for their actions'." (See also: "My beating by refugees is a symbol of the hatred and fury of this filthy war" (Robert Fisk, Independent, 2001/12/10))"My beating by refugees is a symbol of the hatred and fury of this filthy war" (Robert Fisk, Independent, 2001/12/10)
Found via Best of The Web Today, who points out that Fisk "says he was the victim of a hate crime, attacked simply because he was a Westerner. And he is in favor of hate crimes": "They started by shaking hands. We said "Salaam aleikum" – peace be upon you – then the first pebbles flew past my face. A small boy tried to grab my bag. Then another. Then someone punched me in the back. Then young men broke my glasses, began smashing stones into my face and head. I couldn't see for the blood pouring down my forehead and swamping my eyes. And even then, I understood. I couldn't blame them for what they were doing. In fact, if I were the Afghan refugees of Kila Abdullah, close to the Afghan-Pakistan border, I would have done just the same to Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.""The cycle of absurdity" (Michael Freund, The Jerusalem Post, 2001/12/05)
"After the past week of bloodshed, it should now be clear to even the most ardent defenders of the Palestinian cause that Arafat is not a partner for peace. ... As self-evident as this would appear to be, there are still those incapable of mustering up the moral courage to point the finger of blame squarely at Arafat. ... After the attacks in Jerusalem and Haifa earlier this week, the EU issued a statement condemning the violence and calling on the PA to prevent further attacks. It went on, however, to speak of the need for both sides to work toward "breaking the cycle of violence," as if both Israel and the Palestinians are equally to blame for the events of the past 14 months. By referring to the intifada as a "cycle of violence," rather than a full-fledged Palestinian assault against Israel, the EU is choosing moral equivalence over moral clarity, which effectively provides the Palestinians with political cover to carry out future assaults.""American academics get it wrong, again" (Helle Bering, The Washington Times, 2001/11/28)
"The September 11 terrorist attack "was no more despicable than the massive acts of terrorism . . . that the United States has committed during my lifetime." Who said this? A crazed Muslim extremist? Or a professor at a major American University? ... But all three of the quotations above originated on American colleges campuses in the days and weeks after September 11 and are quoted in a recent report, "How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It," by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. Given the awful losses Americans had just sustained in the worst terrorist attack the United States had ever seen, such sentiments may come as a surprise. Then again, given the rampant suspicion bordering on hatred of everything American that has been nurtured by the academy for decades, such reactions are as predictable as they remain shocking." (See also: "How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It" (Jerry L. Martin and Anna D. Neal, ACTA, November 2001))"Idiocy Watch: Special Norman Mailer Edition" (The News Republic, 2001/11/20)
A report on what Norman Mailer told an audience at the Cross Border Festival in Amsterdam on October 29: "Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel, which consequently had to be destroyed. ... And then came the next shock. We had to realize that the people that did this were brilliant. It showed that the ego we could hold up until September 10 was inadequate. ... The key thing is that we in America are convinced that it was blind, mad fanatics who didn't know what they were doing. But what if those perpetrators were right and we were not? We have long ago lost the capability to take a calm look at the enormity of our enemy's position.""Watch out, bin Laden, the West is winning" (Tom Utley, The Daily Telegraph, 2001/11/12)
"I was particularly struck by one question that [bin Laden] put last week to his Pakistani interviewer, Hamid Mir. "You journalists, you never ask Bush or Blair why they are killing people," he said. "Why do you ask me?" Well, I suppose that somebody should explain it to him, and it may as well be me. The reason, Mr bin Laden, is that Mr Bush and Mr Blair are between them the elected leaders of more than 300 million human beings, while you are just a murderer who has spent his daddy's money on arming about 15,000 deluded fanatics. We know why Bush and Blair are killing people. They are killing people because you, Mr bin Laden, murdered many thousands of American and British citizens, and they do not want you to murder any more. Every drop of blood shed in Afghanistan is on your hands.""Holocaust denial comes to Knoxville..." (Glenn Reynolds, InstaPundit.Com, 2001/11/08)
"...in the form of a "teach in" on the war scheduled for November 14th. I received an email flyer for this event, and thought little of it until I opened the PDF attachment containing the poster for the event. There, side by side, were pictures of the WTC collapsing and of the burning Red Cross warehouse in Kabul that was accidentally hit by a bomb. They were quite explicitly presented as equivalent events. To equate a deliberate attack that killed 5000 people (and was meant to kill far more) with an accidental attack that killed no one is a grotesque moral obtuseness that borders on the obscene. It is, quite literally, a species of holocaust denial. ... The treatment of the World Trade Center attack in this poster is grotesque, insensitive, and beyond belief. Or it would be, if I hadn't seen similar things from the so-called "peace" movement already. Of course, as a believer in free speech, I think they have the right to speak on campus, just as Nazis or other hate groups would have the right to speak on campus. And I mean it exactly that way.""War Support Ebbs Worldwide - Sept. 11 Doesn't Justify Bombing, Many Say" (Kevin Sullivan, The Washington Post, 2001/11/07)
"A poll taken this week for France 3 television and France Info radio, for instance, showed support among the French for the U.S. military campaign has dropped to 51 percent, down from 66 percent shortly after the bombing began Oct. 7. Support also has declined in Germany, where polls show more than 65 percent of respondents now want the U.S. attacks to end, and in Spain, where a poll for Cadena SER radio showed 69 percent of those surveyed want the bombing to stop. ... "No one in his right mind can defend the gruesome murder of innocent children and the elderly in pursuit of one man whose guilt cannot be proved beyond doubt," Garth le Pere, director of the Institute for Global Dialogue, told reporters in Johannesburg.""Chomsky Attacks U.S. Double Standards on Terrorism" (tehrantimes.com, 2001/11/06)
Noam Chomsky is on a "lecture tour" in Central Asia, preaching his anti-American gospel. One would hope that his fanaticism finally stands exposed for all to see by his Post-September 11 stance: "Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Noam Chomsky launched a stunning attack on Washington double standards on terrorism. According to the statesman, an English daily published from New Delhi, Chomsky in his clearest voice of dissent in contemporary America described the U.S.-led attacks on Afghanistan as a "silent genocide", affecting millions of innocent civilians. "They are not the Taleban," he told an overflowing audience at the Fifth D.T. Lakdawala memorial lecture on 'peering into the abyss of the future' which included Indian ministers, diplomats, members of the academia in a 70-minute lecture at the Ficci Auditorium in New Delhi recently. "Terrorism is terrorism that is directed against the U.S. and its friends and allies," he said before reeling out a string of statistics on the misery of the Afghanistan people and U.S. neo-imperialist policies over the decades. ... Chomsky, who kicked off his fortnight long lecture tour of the subcontinent, which will also take him to Pakistan, highlighted the use of brute military and economic might by the U.S. against indigenous people in various parts of the world, particularly Central America. "In the Reagan years alone, U.S.-sponsored state terrorists in Central America left hundreds of thousands of tortured and mutilated corpses, millions on maimed and orphaned, and four countries in ruins, he said." (See also: "Brendan - Manufacturing dissent: Chomsky dissembles on Afghan hunger" (SpinSanity, 2001/11/05): "Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary Online defines genocide as "the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group". It is a grave charge that Chomsky completely fails to prove. The lack of food aid to starving Afghans is neither deliberate (if it was, why would the US be increasing its food aid efforts?) nor systematic (most of the lack of food aid is attributable to the Taliban blocking its distribution). Moreover, the "genocide" is not "silent". On October 9, shortly before Chomsky's speech, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, among other papers, all ran stories on relief officials who believed the US airdrops of food were inadequate. This coverage has continued in the mainstream US press. In fact, the Washington Post recently reported that an international food airlift is now being planned to bring greater supplies into remote regions of the country. Millions of Afghans are undoubtedly at risk, creating real moral dilemmas. Unfortunately, Chomsky's deceptive and inflammatory rhetoric adds little to the debate.". Also: "Noam Chomsky Volunteers to Serve as Domestic Propaganda Chief for Taliban War Machine" (David Horowitz, FrontPageMagazine, 2001/10/29))"Earth to Ivory Tower: Get Real!" (Kay S. Hymowitz and Harry Stein, The Wall Street Journal, 2001/11/05)
"As close to self-parody as they come, these speeches make clear what motivates those Americans, on campus and off, who remain in a state of moral denial even after getting a Technicolor view of evil: multiculturalism. This ideology goes way beyond preaching the tolerance that is a bedrock virtue of a pluralistic society to insisting that all cultures are equally good - regardless of whether they beat their women, practice slavery or torture political dissidents. ... The moral paralysis these ideas have caused is blatantly obvious on college campuses. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, one teacher of creative writing at Pasadena City College described a class discussion of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," in which students refused to judge the stoning of a village resident because they believed human sacrifice might be part of the villagers' religion. One student explained: "We are taught not to judge - and if [stoning] has worked for them," we can't condemn it. In another article in the same journal, a Hamilton College philosophy professor noted that his students were reluctant to judge Hitler, apartheid, and slavery. "Of course I dislike the Nazis," one student observed, "but who is to say they are morally wrong?" If one can't judge Nazism morally repugnant, it's easy to ascribe to murderous terrorists understandable and even valid reasons. Aren't Islamist radicals expressing their own cultural truth?""Idiocy Watch #9" (The New Republic, 2001/11/01)
It never stops, does it? The ninth installment of "all the dumb and outrageous things being said and written about America and the terrorists": "Someone asked a question about pure evil, citing the terrorist attacks on America as an example. With great presence, [Ruth] Rendell replied that we could not categorise such attacks as evil, since they were carried out from the highest motives and in the name of freedom. The audience hated this reply - there was a collective and audible shudder. Yet who reading Bin Laden's speeches can doubt it? There is no cynicism in the man - he has never heard of a spin doctor.... We need not sympathise with him to recognise a gulf between the pragmatic concerns of the west and the fervent beliefs of the east. How to bridge east and west is the question - and bombs are not the answer." - Jeanette Winterson, The Guardian, October 16.""Elitist contempt for American values" (Walter Williams, TownHall, 2001/10/31)
"College campuses are home to elitists who are out of touch with and have contempt for American values. ... A California Chico State College professor said that President Bush wants to "kill innocent people," "colonize" the Arab world and capture "oil for the Bush family." ... Adam Goldstein, University of Wisconsin-Madison's former campus relations committee chairman, said in a letter to the editor of the Badger Herald that "before you preach at us about the evil terrorists, why don't you try getting your facts straight and face up to the reality that our leaders are war criminals just as much as people like Hitler, Stalin and other monsters of the 20th century." ... As parents, we cough up to $30,000 and sometimes more in tuition money to have our youngsters taught that America is not only a racist, sexist and homophobic nation, but a terrorist nation as well, and an international monster creating world poverty and destroying the planet." (See also: "Al Qaeda's Unwitting Allies" (Young America's Foundation, 2001/10/24) "Rutgers University Professor Barbara Foley wrote that 'whatever its [the terrorist attacks] proximate cause, its ultimate cause is the fascism of U.S. foreign policy over the past many decades.'", "Academic Freedom: A Time for Reform" (John Taylor, Virginia Viewpoint, October 2001) "For the last three decades, parents and taxpayers have paid ever-increasing amounts for the rising generation to be taught that all cultures are of equal merit; that values are merely social constructs; that morality is relative; that reason and truth are nothing more than tools used to perpetuate white male domination; and that America is racist, sexist, homophobic, and not nearly vegetarian enough", "FIRE and the Aftermath of September 11" (FIRE, October 2001) "Across the nation, in response to the atrocities of September 11, 2001, and to the debates and discussions that have occurred in their wake, many college and university administrators are acting to inhibit the free expression of the citizens of a free society.")"Israel and the FO" (The Daily Telegraph, 2001/10/26)
"A British minister yesterday crossed a new line of hostility to Israel by accusing it of terrorism in the West Bank. Peter Hain, who is responsible for Europe at the Foreign Office, put last week's assassination of Rehavam Ze'evi, the tourism minister, and the Israeli response to it on a par, by referring to "atrocities and terrorist acts in the occupied areas." ... The Government should answer this question: if Mr Hain, or any other minister, were assassinated by the IRA, would it not pursue the perpetrators, if necessary by armed force? To murder a minister is to declare war on a state.""'Brutality smeared in peanut butter'" (Arundhati Roy, The Guardian, 2001/10/23)
Arundhati Roy seems to be sort of a female Noam Chomsky, combining moral equivalence and anti-Americanism with an inverted view of modern history: "The International Coalition Against Terror is a largely [sic] cabal of the richest countries in the world. Between them, they manufacture and sell almost all of the world's weapons, they possess the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction - chemical, biological and nuclear. They have fought the most wars, account for most of the genocide, subjection, ethnic cleansing and human rights violations in modern history, and have sponsored, armed and financed untold numbers of dictators and despots. Between them, they have worshipped, almost deified, the cult of violence and war. For all its appalling sins, the Taliban just isn't in the same league." (See also: "The algebra of infinite justice" (Arundhati Roy, The Guardian, 2001/09/29))"The view from the mosque: the Taliban are not all that bad" (The Observer, 2001/10/21)
"Three visitors to the Shahjahan mosque in Woking, Surrey - Britain's oldest place of Muslim worship - voice their growing resolve against the war before Friday prayers": "'I am obviously against the attacks on Afghanistan: in fact, I hate everything this "war on terrorism" stands for. Not that I am with the Taliban - I wouldn't go as far as to say that I support them in any way. But I have heard from friends that they are not all that bad. So when I see reports on TV about executions and the way they treat women, I'm not always sure I should believe them. People say that the Taliban ban everything - don't the West ban their journalists from telling the truth as well?' [Nasir Ahmed, 31]" (See also: "The view from the mosque: more riots to come" and "The view from the mosque: they're demonising Islam")"Questions for the Anti-War Crowd, Part II - What if someone took them seriously?" (Michael Long, Jewish World Review, 2001/10/19)
"Here's a flash for the anti-war movement: politics is rarely a matter of pure choices between good and evil. The protesters are afraid of moral imperfection, so they damn anything less than the ideal. And while they wait for that ship to come in, innocent people pay the price; lately in the form of greater exposure to terrorism. Because she is imperfect, the protesters cannot stand the thought of supporting her. But the question is not of America's perfection. She isn't perfect. The real question is this: Is America - or any other nation, for that matter - good enough and tolerant enough to merit defending against her enemies?""Idealising the other side" (Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Guardian, 2001/10/19)
"The trouble is that, even though the peace party may be right about war in general or a particular war, it is all too often wrong about the enemy. Acting on the unspoken principle "their country right or wrong", the liberal left has a fatal tendency to idealise and extenuate the other side. This has happened again and again over the past hundred years, going back to the most dramatic example of all. ... And yet history is tragic, human nature is not essentially benign, the Boers were not noble heroes, the Kaiser and Hitler were not much-maligned men pushed to the end of their tether. And Bin Laden and his followers are not Fanon's wretched of the earth avenging injustice, they are bloodthirsty religious maniacs. The world is not as simple - or as lovable - as liberals would sometimes wish.""The New Cold War" (David Pryce-Jones, National Review, 2001/10/17)
"The moment the new organizing principles emerged, the same Cold War objectors of yesterday appeared as if they had been ready in the wings for a reprise. That too is spooky. Without a hiccup, the professors and students, actresses and clergymen, and all who used to hold that an aggressive United States was responsible for starting and pursuing the Cold War against a peace-loving Soviet Union, have adapted this self-accusation to present circumstances. The Left is again collecting petitions against war, mobilizing demonstrations in major cities, pleading that humanitarian considerations ought to exclude any military measures — never mind the victims of September 11 — and calling for bin Laden to be brought before a court, an Alice-in-Wonderland prospect.""Idiocy Watch #5" (The New Republic, 2001/10/17)
The fifth installment of "all the dumb and outrageous things being said and written about America and the terrorists.": "'I'm not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House.' - Eric Foner, London Review of Books, October 4""Kumbaya Watch: Kingsolver, Again" (Ross Douthat, National Review, 2001/10/16)
Douthat examines Kingsolver's latest ramblings: "But before we get swept away by Kingsolver's global vision of peace, love, and "efficient public transit," we should remember that she is, first and foremost, a creative writer. So spare a thought, if you please, for this noted novelist's choice of simile to describe America's war on terrorism: 'I feel like I'm standing on a playground where the little boys are all screaming at each other, "He started it!" and throwing rocks that keep taking out another eye, another tooth. I keep looking around for somebody's mother to come on the scene saying, "Boys! Boys! Who started it cannot possibly be the issue here. People are getting hurt." I am somebody's mother, so I will say that now: The issue is, people are getting hurt.'""Koran and Country" (BBC News/Panorama, 2001/10/14)
An excellent documentary about sentiments in the Muslim community in Birmingham on the war against terror: "Dr Naseem: We were with them in mourning that tragedy. We are not with them in executing a further tragedy. This is barbarism. This is the route which Hitler took. He justified his action because he believed that he was right and he had a right to cross through different countries because he believed so. This kind of one sided belief was not acceptable to the civilised community then, it should not be acceptable now. We condemn it wholeheartedly. White: And afterwards, the elders, from the Committee of the Mosque agreed that it was reasonable in this case to compare President Bush to Hitler." (Full transcript)"Islam 'hijacked' by terror" (Kate Goldberg, BBC News, 2001/10/11)
A mindboggling version of the art of victimology and moral equivalency: "However, [Hamra] Yusuf believes that the West also has an obligation to recognise Muslim grievances, and recognise what he calls the 'moral ambiguities' of the current situation. 'Portraying the Taleban as evil is very stupid,' he said. 'They are by-products of the Cold War. They have been flooded with weapons from the West, and they're as much victims as the Twin Tower victims.'""Even Pacifists Must Support This War" (Scott Simon, The Wall Street Journal, 2001/10/11)
Simon sees the pacifists stance as reminiscent of that of the Oxford Union in 1933: "They saw no moral difference between Western colonialism and world fascism. The Oxford Union ended that debate with this famous proclamation: "Resolved, that we will in no circumstances fight for king and country." Von Ribbentrop sent back the good news to Germany's new chancellor, Hitler: The West will not fight for its own survival. Its finest minds will justify a silent surrender. In short, the best-educated young people of their time could not tell the difference between the deficiencies of their own nation, in which liberty and democracy were cornerstones, and a dictatorship founded on racism, tyranny and fear.""City Council Fails to Consider Resolution to Denounce Violence" (The Daily Californian, 2001/10/10)
Moral equivalence #517: "A last-minute condemnation of the ongoing U.S. military action against Afghanistan fell short of the support needed for the resolution to be heard Tuesday by the Berkeley City Council, but is expected to be considered next week. ... 'Berkeley has always been an island of sanity in terms of the war madness that has prevailed in this country,' [progressive Councilmember Dona] Spring said. 'The U.S. is now a terrorist. According to the Taliban these are terrorist attacks.'""Towers of Intellect" (James Bowman, The Wall Street Journal, 2001/10/05)
"Thus, taking their comforts and the freedoms that produced them for granted, the professors can write airily of the 'cycle of violence' - or, as Prof. Zinn puts it, 'a hundred years of retaliation, vengeance, war, a hundred years of terrorism and counterterrorism, of violence met with violence, in an unending cycle of stupidity.' Talk about a cycle of stupidity! Does a policeman who has to subdue a violent criminal by force become guilty of the same crime? Is he perpetuating 'the cycle of violence'?""Kumbaya Watch: Feminists for the Taliban" (Ross Douthat, National Review, 2001/10/05)
"So, to sum up, Professor Thobani believes that the U.S., not the Taliban, practices "patriarchal racist violence." (Apparently, stoning people for adultery doesn't make the cut.) She believes that the U.S., not the Taliban, wants to "slaughter people into submission." She believes that the U.S., not the Taliban, represents the "forces of darkness, uncivilized, intent on destroying civilization, intent on destroying democracy." And she believes that her fellow feminists, champions of women's rights all, ought to ally themselves with the Taliban, and not the U.S.""Not Ready for Prime Time: Peaceniks" (James P. Pinkerton, Los Angeles Times, 2001/10/02)
"Others were more serious, such as Karly Whittaker, 25, a University of Iowa student. I asked her the same question: What changed on Sept. 11? 'It brought home to me the fragility of our situation,' she answered. And so what to do? 'Let's not fight the wrong war. Let's get to the root causes. Let's evaluate sanctions on Iraq, our support for Israel and for military dictatorships around the world.' Another 25-year-old, Chris Shephard, a schoolteacher in Tampa, sounded similar themes: 'We can't turn tragedy into war.' We must also, he said, 'directly address the crimes of the U.S.' He was sorry about the 6,000 people killed in New York City, but wanted to talk more about the '1 million Iraqis killed by sanctions.'""The Best and the Brightest" (The Wall Street Journal, 2001/10/02)
"At a recent University of North Carolina 'teach-in,' one lecturer told students that if he were President, he would first apologize to 'the widows and orphans, the tortured and the impoverished and all the millions of other victims of American imperialism.' Over at Yale, Professor Paul Kennedy asked the audience to understand the reasons people had for their hatred of America--notably our military and economic power, our culture, and more. University of Texas Professor Robert Jensen wrote that the attack 'was no more despicable than the massive acts of terrorism . . . that the U.S. government has committed during my lifetime.'""The algebra of infinite justice" (Arundhati Roy, The Guardian, 2001/09/29)
A longwinded editorial, which perfectly captures the algebra of moral equivalence, equating Bush with bin Laden: "But who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin Laden? He's America's family secret. He is the American president's dark doppelgänger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilised. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America's foreign policy... ... Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable.""The fascist sympathies of the soft left" (Christopher Hitchens, The Spectator, 2001/09/29)
"The very first step that we must take, therefore, is the acquisition of enough self-respect and self-confidence to say that we have met an enemy and that he is not us, but someone else. ... But straight away, we meet people who complain at once that this enemy is us, really. Did we not aid the grisly Taleban to achieve and hold power? ... I have no hesitation in describing this mentality, carefully and without heat, as soft on crime and soft on fascism. No political coalition is possible with such people and, I’m thankful to say, no political coalition with them is now necessary. It no longer matters what they think.""U.S. just as guilty of committing own violent acts" (Robert Jensen, HoustonChronicle, 2001/09/26)
Yet another study in moral equivalence and anti-Americanism: "Like everyone in the United States and around the world, I shared the deep sadness at the deaths of thousands. But as I listened to people around me talk, I realized the anger and fear I felt were very different, for my primary anger is directed at the leaders of this country and my fear is not only for the safety of Americans but for innocent civilians in other countries. ... For more than five decades throughout the Third World, the United States has deliberately targeted civilians or engaged in violence so indiscriminate that there is no other way to understand it except as terrorism.""And our flag was still there" (Barbara Kingsolver, San Francisco Chronicle, 2001/09/25)
Since the terror attacks many anti-American comments have used the words "terror" and "terrorist" to describe the American society: "Patriotism threatens free speech with death. It is infuriated by thoughtful hesitation, constructive criticism of our leaders and pleas for peace. It despises people of foreign birth who've spent years learning our culture and contributing their talents to our economy. It has specifically blamed homosexuals, feminists and the American Civil Liberties Union. In other words, the American flag stands for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia, and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder? Who are we calling terrorists here?""The Clash of Ignorance" (Edward W. Said, The Nation, 2001/09/22)
Said takes on Huntington's seminal essay "The Clash of Civilizations?" by refuting that there are any valid labels at all: "How finally inadequate are the labels, generalizations and cultural assertions. At some level, for instance, primitive passions and sophisticated know-how converge in ways that give the lie to a fortified boundary not only between "West" and "Islam" but also between past and present, us and them, to say nothing of the very concepts of identity and nationality about which there is unending disagreement and debate.""Excusing Terror - The Politics of Ideological Apology" (Michael Walzer, The American Prospect, 2001/09/22)
"The last excuse is the claim that all the obvious and conventionally endorsed responses to terror are somehow worse than terrorism itself. Any coercive political or military action is denounced as revenge, the end of civil liberty, the beginning of fascism. The only morally permitted response is to reconsider the policies that the terrorists claim to be attacking. Here, terrorism is viewed from the side of the victims as a kind of moral prompting: Oh, we should have thought of that!""Blaming the U.S., whitewashing terror" (National Post, 2001/09/19)
"At the heart of the propaganda campaign against the United States is a moral equivalence conflating what is evil with what is merely imperfect. In the Cold War, this tactic took the form of the argument that the United States was just as dictatorial as the Soviet Union because poor Americans were allegedly not "free" from injustice, racism and want. Now that we have entered a new kind of war, this fatuous argument has been recycled: Yes, Islamist maniacs slaughter thousands of innocents ... but think of the psychic pain inflicted on the Middle East by Taco Bell and the Backstreet Boys. Who is to judge which is more inhumane?""The End of Innocence" (Joel Rogers, The Nation, 2001/09/17)
Yet another anti-American tirade using the moral equivalence trick: "The first is that our own government, through much of the past fifty years, has been the world's leading "rogue state." Merely listing the plainly illegal or unauthorized uses of force the US was responsible for during the long period of cold war, and continued during the past decade of "purposeless peace"--assassinations, engineered coups, terrorizing police forces, military invasions, "force without war," direct bombings, etc.--would literally take volumes. And behind that list reside the bodies of literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocents, most of them children, whose lives we have taken without any pretense to justice.""On the Bombings" (Noam Chomsky, zmag.org, 2001/09/16)
Noam Chomsky comments on the terror attacks betrays his anti-American obsession as soon as possible: "The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they may not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton's bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers of people...""Islam and the West are inadequate banners" (Edward Said, The Observer, 2001/09/16)
Said speaks of the "roots of terror in injustice", which, not surprisingly, he considers are found in the foreign policy of the U.S.: "Political rhetoric in the US has overridden these things by flinging about words like 'terrorism' and 'freedom' whereas, of course, such large abstractions have mostly hidden sordid material interests, the influence of the oil, defence and Zionist lobbies now consolidating their hold on the entire Middle East, and an age-old religious hostility to (and ignorance of) 'Islam' that takes new forms every day.""Fear & Loathing in America" (Hunter S. Thompson, ESPN.com, 2001/09/12)
Thompson does a predictible moral equivalence-stunt, equating the fanaticism of the terrorists with "ours": "Make no mistake about it: We are At War now - with somebody - and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy."
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Articles
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"Losing the Enlightenment" (Victor Davis Hanson, OpinionJournal, 2006/11/29)
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"'Sex in the Park': The latest doings of the Danish imams" (Henrik Bering, The Weekly Standard, 2006/11/18)
"Narcissism on Stilts" (Harold Evans, New York Sun, 2006/11/16)
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Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P.
"The Rage, the Pride and the Doubt" (Oriana Fallaci, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/03/13)
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"On Jew-hatred in Europe" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2002/04/13)
"Anger and Pride" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2001/12/19)
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