"Immoral
equivalency"
"While it sounds noble, the rhetoric of moral equivalency is not only empty, but also destructive. To equate blame is to deny responsibility. And to deny responsibility is to remove disincentive for violence. The quickest way to end terrorism is not to spout platitudes, but rather to create consequences." (Michael Rubin)
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 -
June 2002
"Fish Story" (Peter Berkowitz, The New Republic, 2002/06/28)
"No common sense and no love of country" (Suzanne Fields, The Washington Times, 2002/06/27)
"So, we are all racist, but it doesn't change anything?" (Janet Daley, The Daily Telegraph, 2002/06/26)
"The Real Nazis" (Jonah Goldberg, National Review, 2002/06/21)
"CNN chief accuses Israel of terror" (Oliver Burkeman and Peter Beaumont, The Guardian, 2002/06/18)
"From Berkeley to Jenin" (Gerald M. Steinberg, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/06/07)
"Damned if they don't" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/06/06)
May 2002
"The Ideological War Within the West" (John Fonte, Foreign Policy Research Institute, May 2002)
"All cultures are not equal" (Kenan Malik, spiked, 2002/05/28)
"The Abuse of History" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2002/05/21)
"Hooligans take their cue" (Evelyn Gordon, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/05/14)
"The 'Fascist' and the 'Activist'" (David Brooks, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/05/20 issue)
"Palestine and the Geocentric Left" (Bruce S. Thornton, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/05/10)
"Deadly Tolerance" (Jonathan Foreman, New York Post, 2002/05/10)
"A New Dutch Gay Politician: Pim Fortuyn" (Paul Varnell, Independent Gay Forum, 2002/04/27)
"Post, News flay reputations of 2" (Dave Koppel, Rocky Mountains News, 2002/05/05)
"An Eminence With No Shades of Gray" (Michael Powell, The Washington Post, 2002/05/05)
April 2002
"Some of Israel's critics are more equal than others" (Rex Murphy, The Globe and Mail, 2002/04/27)
"Back to abnormal" (Diana West, The Washington Times, 2002/04/26)
"The Inversion Syndrome" (Bret Stephens, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/04/25)
"A New Low for The Nation: The Left and the Mid-East Crisis" (Ronald Radosh, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/04/19)
"Why the Jews are always to blame" (Melanie Phillips, The Spectator, from the 2002/04/20 issue)
"Eye on the Media: Depending on your 'point of view'" (Bret Stephens, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/04/14)
"This war tells us more about Europe than the Middle East" (Mark Steyn, The Daily Telegraph, 2002/04/14)
"Moral Styrofoam" (Jonah Goldberg, National Review, 2002/04/09)
"Legitimacy And Labels" (William Raspberry, The Washington Post, 2002/04/08)
"Radical Jewish Left reaches new low in morality - adopts 'traffic accident' standard - murder of 149 termed 'almost nonexistent terror'" (IMRA, 2002/04/05)
"Uncertain Uncertainty - Postmodernism unravels" (Dave Kopel, National Review, 2002/04/04)
March 2002
"Anger and Action" (Michael Rubin, The New Republic, 2002/03/30)
"Postmodern Palestine" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2002/03/29)
"The good, the bad and the Gallic shrug" (Mark Steyn, Jewish World Review, 2002/03/27)
"Our Rose-Colored Cold War" (Fred Hiatt, The Washington Post, 2002/03/25)
"Immoral equivalency" (Michael Rubin, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/03/17)
"No Equivalence - Bush's men should know better than to liken soldiers to suicide bombers" (The Wall Street Journal, 2002/03/14)
"Two Stubborn Men, and Many Dead" (Amos Oz, The New York Times, 2002/03/12)
"Left Plays Survivor" (Stanley Kurtz, National Review, 2002/03/07)
January 2002
"Creatures of the cultural cringe" (Theodore Dalrymple, The Spectator, from the 2002/02/02 issue)
"U.S. slams Syria for equating Gaza demolitions, WTC attacks" (Reuters/Haaretz, 2002/01/18)
"Fish Story" (Peter Berkowitz, The New Republic, 2002/06/28)
Berkowitz takes on Stanley Fish's "public relations campaign on postmodernism's behalf": "His current argument about the relevance of postmodernism to September 11 and the world it created has this same, characteristically charming audacity about it. It is also rank sophistry. ... According to Fish, the new critics didn't grasp postmodernism's true meaning. They were under the mistaken impression that "since postmodernists deny the possibility of describing matters of fact objectively, they leave us with no firm basis for either condemning the terrorist attacks or fighting back." In fact, claimed Fish, "Postmodernism maintains only that there can be no independent standard for determining which of many rival interpretations of an event is the true one." These two passages may have left some readers puzzled. Had not Fish, in the span of two sentences, just reaffirmed the notion he said he was knocking down? The lack of independent standards for determining the truth among competing accounts is what most people mean by the impossibility of describing the facts objectively.""No common sense and no love of country" (Suzanne Fields, The Washington Times, 2002/06/27)
"Gloria Steinem, actors Ossie Davis and Ed Asner, playwrights Eve Ensler ("The Vagina Monologues"), Tony Kushner ("Angels in America") and Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor who is always first in line to find fault with America, have signed a letter in the name of "people of conscience," urging "all Americans to resist the war and repression that has been loosed on the world by the Bush administration. It is unjust, immoral and illegitimate." ... In a poll of 634 college students, conducted by Frank Luntz for a new organization called Americans for Victory Over Terrorism, only 3 percent "strongly agree" that Western culture is superior to the culture of the Arab world. Fully 43 percent "strongly disagree." They weren't asked to consider specifically why a culture that systematically represses women, executes homosexuals, restricts the press, abrogates freedom of speech and religion and persecutes Christians and Jews is thought to be just as good as a culture that empowers women, works to eliminate prejudice against homosexuals, and guarantees freedom of the press, of speech and of religion." (See also: "College students speak out" (AVOT, 2002/06/20), for more poll results from the survey.)"So, we are all racist, but it doesn't change anything?" (Janet Daley, The Daily Telegraph, 2002/06/26)
Daley on Sir David Calvert Smith's, the director of public prosecutions, assertion that "we are all racists": "What you might call overt, or practising, racism is clearly not the issue. We have got far beyond the merely empirical questions of people's actions and behaviour. Sir David referred specifically to racism in "the Macpherson sense": that is, the unwitting, unrecognised, unconscious sense in which racial prejudice is so deeply buried in the underpinning of our personalities that it requires excavation to be discovered. This is the sense in which we are all guilty. Racism is not so much a set of obnoxious acts, cruel afflictions or unfair practices: it is a form of original sin that inheres in the consciousness of us all, however oblivious we might be of its existence. The only way that we can ever be free from this curse (and thus enable Sir David's colleagues to go about their work effectively) is to perform psycho-social surgery, probing deep below the layers of tolerance and fairness (or even indifference to the issue) that we believe to be our true feelings. Not until we acknowledge our true racist nature (or confess our fault, to use the theological language that is the model for this) can we eradicate it. As with all mystical authoritarianism, whether it is Maoist re-education or McCarthyite accusation, your denial of guilt will be held against you.""The Real Nazis" (Jonah Goldberg, National Review, 2002/06/21)
"The Palestinians are the Arab world's Sudeten Germans. The "liberation" of their coreligionists and ethnic brothers is used as a utopian carrot guiding brainwashed donkey after brainwashed donkey to murder and suicide. I am not saying that Arabs or Muslims generally are Nazis or Nazi-like. That would be absurd. But I am saying that the Arab world is the only place left on this planet which bears a reasonable resemblance to Germany in the 1930s, with the open and accepted dissemination of Nazi-like ideas and ambitions. ... But there's something more to it. In the West, in America, in "civilized" circles, there's a deep desire to deny the obvious out of shame or some other form of moral laziness. Sometimes the motive is to preserve Third World peoples as victims of the West. To these people "power" — specifically "Western" or colonial power - defines Nazism. But this is absurd. Power does not make you Nazi-like; if it did, America would be a Fourth Reich already - and again, it's not. No, what makes you Nazi-like is the worship of power, particularly the power to murder, especially when you don't have it. You don't have to commit genocide to be a Nazi; you just have to want to commit genocide. Does anyone doubt that if given the chance, there would be countless Arab groups or governments who would leap at the opportunity to wipe out all of the Jews? One need only take their word for it.""CNN chief accuses Israel of terror" (Oliver Burkeman and Peter Beaumont, The Guardian, 2002/06/18)
Ted Turner, a self-acclaimed "very good thinker", in an interview which is an exercise in moral equivalency: "Ted Turner, the billionaire founder of CNN, accuses Israel today of engaging in "terrorism" against the Palestinians, in comments that threaten to lead to a further decline in the news network's already poor relations with the Jewish state. "Aren't the Israelis and the Palestinians both terrorising each other?" says Turner, who is vice-chairman of AOL Time Warner, which owns CNN, in an exclusive interview with the Guardian. "The Palestinians are fighting with human suicide bombers, that's all they have. The Israelis ... they've got one of the most powerful military machines in the world. The Palestinians have nothing. So who are the terrorists? I would make a case that both sides are involved in terrorism." ... Mr Turner also admits that he was wrong to call the September 11 hijackers "brave" in a speech in Rhode Island that sparked outrage. "I made an unfortunate choice of words," he says, adding that his ownership of the Atlanta Braves baseball team meant the word was never far from his mind. 'Look, I'm a very good thinker, but I sometimes grab the wrong word...'""From Berkeley to Jenin" (Gerald M. Steinberg, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/06/07)
"The campaign to demonize Israel, which reached a crescendo in the Jenin massacre myths and the Durban conference, did not suddenly appear following the collapse of the Oslo process two years ago. Rather, its origins can be found in the glorious 1960s, in the era of the civil rights movements, free speech, flower power, protests against the Vietnam war, and the marches for justice, equality, and national liberation for all except Jews. ... However, from the moment the Jewish people and Israel ceased being victims and demonstrated the capability to defend themselves and their homeland, the sympathy suddenly shifted to hostility. On university campuses, the use of any military force, even for self-defense and prevention, was automatically condemned as "aggressive" and immoral, and Israel's victory in a war for survival was condemned in the same breath as America's war in Vietnam. ... The rampant intellectual laziness and moral equivalence drawn between terrorist ("activist" or "militant" in newspeak) attacks and self-defense extends far beyond the Israel-Arab framework. ... Terrorism is excused in the name of cultural misperception and responsibility for fictional "root causes" that are used to justify mass murder.""Damned if they don't" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/06/06)
"Terror apologists typically blame Israel for suicide massacres by claiming that such attacks are the work of legitimately aggrieved people driven to desperate measures by Israeli brutality. The trouble with this is, as we've often noted, is that Israel has done nothing to match the barbarity of deliberately murdering civilians. These apologists thus live in a topsy-turvy moral world in which the life of a Jewish child is worth less than an Arab TV set. More topsy-turvy still, however, is this unsigned editorial on a Web site called The Globalist. It argues that the problem with Israel is that it's too civilized: 'To "get rid" of Israel requires international support. As hopeless as such a cause may be, Palestinian extremists do even further damage to their aim by blowing things up. ... The strategy of Israeli extremists uses perfect Machiavellian logic: Provoking Palestinians to violence without committing any themselves are the political means to keeping the occupied territories in the end." (See also: "Suicide Bombers Vs. Suicide Settlers" (The Globalist, 2002/06/06))"The Ideological War Within the West" (John Fonte, Foreign Policy Research Institute, May 2002)
Fonte takes on Fukyama's thesis that Western-style liberal democracy has no serious ideological competitor, by identifying "transnational progressivism" as an ideology which challenges the liberal nation-states from within: "This alternative ideology, "transnational progressivism," constitutes a universal and modern worldview that challenges both the liberal democratic nation-state in general and the American regime in particular. ... The key concepts of transnational progressivism could be described as follows: The ascribed group over the individual citizen. The key political unit is not the individual citizen, who forms voluntary associations and works with fellow citizens regardless of race, sex, or national origin, but the ascriptive group (racial, ethnic, or gender) into which one is born. A dichotomy of groups: Oppressor vs. victim groups, with immigrant groups designated as victims. Transnational ideologists have incorporated the essentially Hegelian Marxist "privileged vs. marginalized" dichotomy. ... The same scholars who touted multiculturalism now herald the coming transnational age. Thus, Alejandro Portes of Princeton University argues that transnationalism, combined with large-scale immigration, will redefine the meaning of American citizenship. ... This intracivilizational Western conflict between liberal democracy and transnational progressivism accelerated after the Cold War and should continue well into the twenty-first century.""All cultures are not equal" (Kenan Malik, spiked, 2002/05/28)
"To be radical today is to display disenchantment with all that is 'Western' - by which most mean modernism and the ideas of the Enlightenment - in the name of 'diversity' and 'difference'. ... 'Subjugation', according to the philosopher David Goldberg, 'defines the order of the Enlightenment: subjugation of nature by human intellect, colonial control through physical and cultural domination, and economic superiority through mastery of the laws of the market'. ... Enlightenment universalism, such critics argue, is racist because it seeks to impose Euro-American ideas of rationality and objectivity on other peoples. 'The universalising discourses of modern Europe and the United States', argues Edward Said, 'assume the silence, willing or otherwise, of the non-European world.' ... The corollary of turning the whole world into a network of victims is to transform the West, and in particular the USA, into an all-powerful malign force - the Great Satan - against which all must rage. ... In this fatalism lies a common thread that binds contemporary Western radicalism and fundamentalist Islam. On the surface the two seem poles apart: fundamentalists loathe Western decadence, Western radicals fear Islamic presumptions of certainty. But what unites the two is that both are rooted in contemporary nihilistic multiculturalism; both express, at best, ambivalence about, at worst outright rejection of, the ideas of modernity, universality, and progress. And both see no real alternative to Western power.""The Abuse of History" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2002/05/21)
"We hear frequently of the "Holocaust" and "genocide" in association with the Israeli incursion into Jenin - especially in the European presses. The very mention of those charged words in reference to fewer than 70 dead in a war zone is blasphemous to the memory of 6 million butchered in a methodical state program of death. Auschwitz alone saw 10,000 gassed on some days. The Palestinians' historical analogies with the Holocaust and Nazis are completely false in order of magnitude, wicked in their shameless efforts to invoke the Nazis to denigrate Holocaust survivals, and spurious in their equation of industrial murder on a continental scale with the minimal collateral damage of war. The only possible affinity with Nazi atrocity in the Middle East could be a similarity in the technique of liquidation, albeit not of magnitude, of Saddam Hussein's gassing of innocent civilians - or perhaps Nasser's earlier use of such terror weapons against Yemeni villages. Indeed, the only gas masks that have ever been needed in the Middle East were employed by Israelis - against Nasser in 1967, and Saddam Hussein in 1991. Those who are now calling Israelis "Nazis" were a decade ago cheering on their rooftops at the news that guided missiles might be blanketing Israel with deadly toxins.""Hooligans take their cue" (Evelyn Gordon, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/05/14)
"Is it just chance that all the hooligans are in Europe? Discounting this far-fetched thesis, the unavoidable conclusion is that Europe has somehow created a climate conducive to anti-Semitic violence, while the US has not. ... Though European governments also pay lip service to Israel's right of self-defense, in 19 months of conflict, there is not a single Israeli tactic that they have not unequivocally condemned. Closures are wrong and roadblocks are wrong, bombing is wrong and ground operations are wrong, even returning fire when shot at is wrong. The underlying message is clear: In reality, Israel has no right to self-defense – the only country in the world so circumscribed. ... European hooligans have in fact grasped perfectly the real message being broadcast by their governments, publics, and media: that anti-Jewish violence is "understandable." And as long as this is so, no amount of official condemnation of such attacks can absolve Europe of the charge of anti-Semitism.""The 'Fascist' and the 'Activist'" (David Brooks, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/05/20 issue)
"In the parlors of polite society, social tolerance sits side by side with multiculturalism. They are two pastries on the platter of polite opinion. But Fortuyn was socially tolerant, even libertine, and it was for that reason he felt he could not be a multiculturalist. The Victorian gent does have a strategy when confronted with this clash of Good Opinions. Insulation. Retreat to the high-minded tolerance of your suburb and social circle, and leave it to other poor buggers to actually live with the intolerant extremists. That is to say, champion multiculturalism from the enlightened venue of leafy London or Cambridge, and force the bastards in Israel or the neighborhoods to actually confront the practical consequences of your ideas. ... But what is interesting from our point of view is that the Victorian gent that is the Western press corps could not even allow Pim Fortuyn to exist. ... To acknowledge the existence of the real Fortuyn would be to acknowledge the rift between tolerance and multiculturalism. To do that would be to explore what this rift means - what it means in the Middle East and at home. That exploration is impermissible. It is beyond the bounds of polite discussion. Hence, it does not exist. Pim Fortuyn is dead. In fact, he never existed.""Palestine and the Geocentric Left" (Bruce S. Thornton, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/05/10)
"Decades of such propaganda and clichés have transformed the Palestinian Arabs into anti-colonial resistors of a Western imperialism embodied in Israel. Supporting the Palestinians, then, is part of supporting the fight against the neo-imperialism of the global economic order, which now colonizes through Coca-Cola and Hollywood rather than through physical occupation and force. ... Israel is reduced to being an actor in the simplistic melodrama of Western oppressor and non-Western exotic victim, even though by any calculation the Israelis - outnumbered 100-1, surrounded by virulent enemies, and assaulted since the nation's birth by guerilla and terrorist attacks, not to mention four wars - are the victims of what could more accurately be considered an Arab attempt to reassert an "imperialist" hegemony over lands it conquered and stripped from their original Greek, Jewish, and Hellenic possessors.""Deadly Tolerance" (Jonathan Foreman, New York Post, 2002/05/10)
"For an illustration of the absurdities of political correctness and the dishonesty of multiculturalism you can't do much better than the reaction of much of the world's press to the killing of the Dutch politician and supposed "extremist" Pim Fortuyn - by a genuinely extremist ecofanatic. ... That Fortuyn's condemnation of Islamic fundamentalist sexism and homophobia was itself attacked as "intolerant" is an example of cultural relativism at its most bizarre and counterintuitive. Fortuyn's reservations about multiculturalism, failed assimilation and Islam's political effects on his country were not only not fascist, they could well have been shared by Thomas Jefferson. His opponents, on the other hand - beginning with his assassin, but including those who demonized and delegitimized him as a beyond-the-pale extremist - demonstrated a close acquaintance with truly fascist means, if not ends.""A New Dutch Gay Politician: Pim Fortuyn" (Paul Varnell, Independent Gay Forum, 2002/04/27)
Best of the Web Today also links to this article, about the "character assassination" which presumably set the atmosphere for the very real assassination: "But his detractors, mostly on the political left, frequently denounce him as racist, fascist and other terms of abusive. But judging from a New York Times article, those claims seem counter-intuitive, slanderous, even crazed. ... There is a fascinating phenomenon here. A man who urges immigrants to embrace their adopted nation's liberal values of political tolerance, women's equality and respect for gays is the one denounced as a racist and fascist. Yet insofar as immigrants suppress women, denounce the very existence of gays, and, we may reasonably suppose, are hostile to Jews, the immigrants seem far closer to those who originally bore the labels now being applied to Fortuyn. At this point we can begin to suspect that terms like "racist" and "fascist" are just empty rhetoric, swear words, with no cognitive content. They are designed merely to delegitimize someone without taking the trouble to provide evidence or argue against their ideas.""Post, News flay reputations of 2" (Dave Koppel, Rocky Mountains News, 2002/05/05)
Best of the Web Today points out this "eerily foreshadowing" column: "Can we have a serious, respectful debate about immigration? Not if we depend on the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post to provide information or set the tone for dialogue. Let's start with the featured Special Report on Page 2 of the April 29 Post, an Associated Press article on Dutch political leader Pim Fortuyn, who is leading a right-wing party expected to do well in the May 13 elections. The article compares Fortuyn to French presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen. This is a repulsive example of character assassination. ... In contrast [to Le Pen], Fortuyn has never expressed the slightest admiration for fascism, or proposed any restrictions on religious or other freedoms. Yet the AP article, and the Post headline accuse Fortuyn of arousing Dutch "demons." ... Fortuyn's sin? The article writes that Fortuyn "calls Islam anti-secular and backward." ... In other words, the gay Dutch sociology professor offered complaints about Islam which are quite similar to complaints that some gay American sociology professors (and other American gays) offer about Christianity: anti-gay, sexist, morally imperialist, and premised on the belief that one religion is superior to all others. Now, when American gay activists make such remarks, the AP doesn't work itself into a lather and claim that the remarks reveal "demons" in the American character, because a lot of Americans agree with the criticism of religion.""An Eminence With No Shades of Gray" (Michael Powell, The Washington Post, 2002/05/05)
An interview with Ayatollah Noam Chomsky: "Today Chomsky is fond of analogies between American and Nazi attempts to rationalize state violence in pursuit of international aims. "Of course the U.S. claims it has reasons," Chomsky says. "And the Nazis had reasons for gassing the Jews. Everyone has reasons. The question is whether they're justified." ... His favorite, of late, is to compare the terror attacks to the American bombing of a Sudanese chemical factory in 1998. President Clinton claimed, erroneously, that this factory produced chemical weapons. A security guard died in that attack. The factory was Sudan's chief source of pharmaceuticals and pesticides. And Chomsky argues - with the use of some elastic math - that tens of thousands of Sudanese perished as a result. Still, you ask, isn't there a moral difference between an act of terror that directly claims 3,000 lives and a mistake that directly claims one life? The Sudan bombing, Chomsky replies, was worse. "The Americans didn't even think about the outcome of the bombing," he says, 'because the Sudanese were so far below contempt as to be not worth thinking about.'""Some of Israel's critics are more equal than others" (Rex Murphy, The Globe and Mail, 2002/04/27)
"The real conundrum for those agonizing over their criticism of Israel and whether this might be construed as anti-Semitism is a question that, so far as I can tell, no one wants to ask: Is it possible to be anti-American and not criticize Israel? Professional anti-Americans really don't have much field of manoeuvre when it comes to Israel. America is Israel's sponsor, its friend and ally, so obviously Israel cannot be right, ever. If Israel is under the protection of the imperialist, globalist, capitalist hegemon, why then - pass me the old res ipsa loquitur, the thing speaks for itself - Israel must always be wrong. ... They are prejudiced against Israel by the logic of their movement. They are, as it were, pro-Palestinian by default. They take sides and wake up to find themselves sharing parts of the landscape with some very scary people who really are anti-Semitic.""Back to abnormal" (Diana West, The Washington Times, 2002/04/26)
"For decades now, the relativist school of thought known as multiculturalism has been pushing Western civilization into disrepute. Maybe it has finally fallen. Something has shifted, certainly, reshaping the global topography to the point where most of what counts as the free world now gravitates toward the repressive forces of terror that surround a vibrant democratic society engaging, however fiercely, in self-defense. That just might make this, then, the penultimate triumph of multiculturalism. In other words, don't count on the battle ending at Israel's borders, wherever they ultimately lie. "A global consensus against Israel has taken shape among all those who hate the values of Western society," Mr. Hume writes. What we didn't fully realize in September was how much of Western society that also includes. Which doesn't, needless to say, bode too well for the rest of us.""The Inversion Syndrome" (Bret Stephens, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/04/25)
"Scanning TV coverage of the latest round of anti-Israel protests in Europe and the US, the slogan that catches the eye is: Zionism = Nazism. It's a radical equation, but not that far off from the current media take on events Israeli. "The truth is that Sharon's war is not a war," writes Joseph Wakim in the Australian Financial Review. "Genocide would be a more accurate description." "The scenes at Jenin last week looked uncannily like the attack on the Warsaw Jewish ghetto in 1944," adds Tom McGurk in the Irish Times. ... And they do so because, when it comes to Israel, commentators and reporters alike have succumbed to what can only be described as the Inversion Syndrome. ... The upshot, then, is this: According to the conventional view, Israel is a country that, out of the blue, conquered a country called Palestine, now comprising the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It has held on to that land in flagrant contravention of international law, chiefly for religiously inspired reasons, creating economic conditions among Palestinians that - regretably perhaps, inevitably for sure - breed terrorism. Israelis are led by a man who acts without counsel or restraint, who seeks to crush an emerging democracy, run by democrats. This is, of course, the opposite of the truth, and the logical culmination of the Inversion Syndrome. It is also what the media reports, what the average, semi-trusting viewer of CNN or the BBC believes, and what the typical American, European, or Japanese diplomat writes in his communiques.""A New Low for The Nation: The Left and the Mid-East Crisis" (Ronald Radosh, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/04/19)
Radosh takes on Peter Falk's "Ending the Death Dance" (The Nation, from the 2002/04/29 issue): "Look carefully at Richard Falk’s words. He is saying, in no uncertain terms, that suicide bombing was a just response reluctantly taken by Palestinian militants to Israeli terrorism - part of the "struggle" that has to continue. ... In other words - Richard Falk is calling upon the Western Left to support the continued terrorism of Arafat and the PLO. It is, he says, simply a matter of "self-help." ... One country proposes major sacrifices for peace; those it negotiates with turn down its offers and opt for terrorism on behalf of their final goal - the destruction of Israel. ... The point is that the Nation Left believes they are the aggressors, and the actual terrorists are the victims. It is a topsy-turvy world, and a confused and dangerous world-view that guides their analysis. ... In that manner, with its editorial and the Falk article, America’s once most distinguished voice of liberalism joins the lynch mob against Israel.""Why the Jews are always to blame" (Melanie Phillips, The Spectator, from the 2002/04/20 issue)
"But Israel has committed a heinous crime. That crime is to seek to defend itself against the attempt to annihilate it. For this effrontery, a torrent of lies, distortions, libels, abandonment of objectivity and the substitution of malice and hatred for truth is pouring out of the British and European media and Establishment. ... Israel, for all its faults, is a democracy and an open society. The Palestinian Authority is a corrupt despotism which has brainwashed its people into believing mediaeval blood libels against the Jews. ... [Palestinians] view Israeli self-defence as an unjustified assault. The response of Britain and Europe is not to acknowledge that this is a monstrous inversion of moral reasoning but to agree that such self-defence is an act of brutality. This is in part because the mind-twisting of the terrorist feeds the moral confusion of the West’s corrupted liberal orthodoxy. This sees a moral equivalence between terror and measures to protect against it. Believing there is no such thing as truth, it embraces lies instead and cannot distinguish victims from their victimisers.""Eye on the Media: Depending on your 'point of view'" (Bret Stephens, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/04/14)
"Moral clarity is a term that doesn't get much traction these days, least of all among journalists, who prefer "objectivity" and "balance." Yet good journalism is more than about separating fact from opinion and being fair. Good journalism is about fine analysis and making distinctions, and this applies as much to moral distinctions as to any others. Because too many reporters today refuse to make moral distinctions, we are left with a journalism whose narrative and analytical failings have become ever more glaring.""This war tells us more about Europe than the Middle East" (Mark Steyn, The Daily Telegraph, 2002/04/14)
"Meanwhile, what have we learned from this last extraordinary month? Not much about the Middle East, but quite a lot about Europe. What happens when Palestinian civilians strap on plastic explosives and head for Israeli pizza parlours? Europe says Israeli checkpoints for Palestinians are "humiliating". Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances permit themselves to be used as transportation for bombs and explosives - and Europe attacks Israel for refusing them free movement. Documents are found authorising Palestinian Authority funding for a suicide bombing on a young girl's bar mitzvah, signed by Arafat himself - and members of the Nobel committee publicly call for taking back the 1994 Peace Prize, from Shimon Peres. Synagogues are firebombed in France, Belgium and Finland - and the EU deplores the wanton destruction of property, in Ramallah.""Moral Styrofoam" (Jonah Goldberg, National Review, 2002/04/09)
"Meanwhile, Israel - a staunch ally of the United States, and the only democracy in the region - is besieged by suicide bombers who have been brainwashed by fanatical cults. These terrorist groups load up glassy-eyed teenagers with explosives, nails, and bullets and convince them to seek out large clusters of women and children. This is all permitted - and sometimes orchestrated - by a veteran terrorist strongman who had in the past helped to orchestrate the murder and kidnapping of Israelis and Americans, including the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. ... So, here we are, halfway into what on paper sounds like a predictable Jerry Bruckheimer flick. ... However, the Europeans and our own lefties have been shifting in their seats uncomfortably and shaking their heads. They don't like some of the "simplistic" messages in the film. ... In their version, the terrorists have "reasons" for what they do. ... In this new version the villains - like other European icons such as Che Guevara or Fidel Castro - are actually heroes. These heroes challenge the dominant paradigm. They make America look bad. And they trade in the true coin of the realm in the EU - white, post-colonial guilt - and with it buy an unending supply of sympathy.""Legitimacy And Labels" (William Raspberry, The Washington Post, 2002/04/08)
According to Raspberry "it does no good to try to separate" terrorism from military defence against terrorism. Change "Palestinian suicide bombers" to "September 11 hijackers" and "Ariel Sharon" to "George W. Bush" and Raspberry's exercise in moral equivalence is hard to separate from the Chomskyite apologetics for the September 11 attacks: "I certainly do not intend to praise the Palestinian suicide bombers who were, for a while during Passover, blowing themselves up on a daily basis. But to think of them as violence-prone cowards - even to call them terrorists - is to miss the most salient fact of their behavior: utter desperation. ... What seems obvious to me is that every act of violence, by both sides, is both aggression and retaliation - and that it does no good to try to separate one from the other. ... Are they terrorists? Certainly. But is Israeli President Ariel Sharon any less a terrorist because he does his thing through a uniformed military, with tanks and machine guns? There's terror - and intransigence and duplicity - on both sides, and precious little value in trying to determine which side owns the preponderance of guilt.""Radical Jewish Left reaches new low in morality - adopts 'traffic accident' standard - murder of 149 termed 'almost nonexistent terror'" (IMRA, 2002/04/05)
"Excerpt from: Civil disobedience for Middle East Peace - an Invitation From: 'rabbilerner'": "Though we at The Tikkun Community oppose the outrageous and disgusting acts of terror against Israelis, we know that the actual level of violence is small compared to the number of Israelis who die each year in automobile accidents. ... And we know that those acts of terror were almost non-existent when the Oslo Accord was being implemented 1993-1995." [IMRA: According to Rabbi Lerner, the murder of 149 Israelis in terror attacks from September 9 through the end of 1995 is "almost non-existent terror"]" (See also: "It's Time To Put Our Bodies On the Line to Stop the Killing in the Middle East" (Rabbi Michael Lerner, Common Dreams, 2002/04/03))"Uncertain Uncertainty - Postmodernism unravels" (Dave Kopel, National Review, 2002/04/04)
"A litany of the stars of post-modernism is mostly a litany for admirers of some form of totalitarianism. ... The intellectual founder of the 1979 Iranian revolution was Ali Shariat, who studied at the Sorbonne, and liked Fanon and Sartre so much that he translated them into Farsi. Another deconstructionist disciple of Heidegger's, Michel Foucault, swooned that Ayotollah Khomeini was "a kind of mystic saint." Foucault welcomed the Ayatollah's "political spirituality" which would take Iran back to its natural roots, overthrowing the modernizing forces of global capitalism. ... Indeed, postmodernism has been the intellectual Axis of Evil of many mass killers. ... September 11 showed us the face of pure evil. Our nation has seen the enemy plainly, and that vision may be the beginning of the end of postmodernism in America. It is no coincidence that the places in America which have been the most reluctant to call al Qaeda evil have been the places where postmodernism is strongest. The rest of America has, happily, finally mustered the self-confidence to stand up to this form of radical nihilism. ... Postmodernism is on its way to the ash heap of history.""Anger and Action" (Michael Rubin, The New Republic, 2002/03/30)
"It is not Israel that is responsible for the death of the peace process, but rather the practice of moral equivalence in international diplomacy. If all sides are equally to blame for the escalation, then the Palestinians might as well radicalize their positions. When Bill Clinton brokered a comprehensive peace agreement at Camp David II, Arafat to the surprise of even his own negotiators walked away. But moral equivalence dictates that blame must be spread equally. Moral equivalency eliminates responsibility. Arafat freed Passover Massacre bomber Abdel al-Baset Odeh from prison, but if Israel responds to the slaughter of her citizens at a religious ceremony, then in European and U.N. eyes, Israel shares equal if not superior blame. Since Europe and the United Nations will protect Arafat from the consequences of his actions, then terror becomes a viable tool.""Postmodern Palestine" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2002/03/29)
"Facts mean nothing. The dispute is purportedly over the principle of occupation - but next-door Syria holds far more Lebanese land than Israel does the West Bank. The dispute is supposedly over ethnic intolerance and gratuitous humiliation - but Kuwait, quite unlike Israel, ethnically cleansed their entire country of Palestinians after the Gulf War. The dispute is said to be about treating the "other" fairly - but Syria and Iraq summarily expelled over 7,000 Jews after the 1967 war, stole their property, and bragged that they had rid their country of them. ... Moral equivalence, conflict-resolution theory, utopian pacifism, and multiculturalism are, of course, antirational and often silly. But we should also have the courage to confess that they bring on, rather than avoid, conflict and killing, and breed rather than eradicate ignorance. In short, they are not ethical ideas at all, but amoral in every sense of the word.""The good, the bad and the Gallic shrug" (Mark Steyn, Jewish World Review, 2002/03/27)
"...the same disinclination to take sides colours our view of almost all contemporary disputes. Countries A and B may be at war, but there is no good side and no bad side, just two parties "trapped" in a "mindless" "cycle of violence" that "threatens the peace process." ... Forget the "cycle of violence" and the "peace process." History teaches us that the most lasting peace is achieved when one side - preferably the worst side - is decisively defeated and the regime's diseased organs are comprehensively cleansed. That's why National Socialism, Fascism and Japanese militarism have not troubled us of late. One can imagine how World War Two would have ended had, say, Mary Robinson, the UN Human Rights poseur, been sitting in Downing Street instead of Winston Churchill. Her crowd should not be running World War Four.""Our Rose-Colored Cold War" (Fred Hiatt, The Washington Post, 2002/03/25)
"As communism was discredited throughout the world, it also became convenient for many Americans to gloss over how contentious anti-communism had been. In fact, almost every tenet and tactic of Cold War policy was divisive. ... Now those glossed-over divisions are reemerging, in parallel to, and as a consequence of, the drawing of battle lines with regard to President Bush's war on terrorism. ... In the New York Times a few weeks ago, an analysis in the Week in Review reported that "some world leaders worried publicly that the war on terrorism was starting to look suspiciously like the last great American campaign - against Communism. ... Like the terrorists today ... Communists were often conceived as moral monsters..." In the article, the possibility that they were moral monsters is not really entertained. ... Among critics on the left, the assumption that rebuilding the military and sending troops abroad is nothing but a political ploy or an imperialist reflex similarly raises questions. We have the benefit now of full knowledge of the Soviet gulag, China's man-made starvations, Vietnam's reeducation camps - we know that there were moral monsters among our adversaries. To act as though that was never true, and to assume automatically that the threat again is overblown, represents a different kind of failure to learn from history.""Immoral equivalency" (Michael Rubin, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/03/17)
"The moral-equivalency labeling of both sides as equally at fault is increasingly in vogue at the UN, in European capitals, and at the US State Department. ... Rather than promote peace, moral equivalency encourages war. When warring parties' positions are automatically morally equalized, then both sides might as well take more extreme stances. Why should Arafat negotiate in good faith, if suicide bombings can legitimize his call to make final agreements the starting point for new negotiation? ... While it sounds noble, the rhetoric of moral equivalency is not only empty, but also destructive. To equate blame is to deny responsibility. And to deny responsibility is to remove disincentive for violence. The quickest way to end terrorism is not to spout platitudes, but rather to create consequences.""No Equivalence - Bush's men should know better than to liken soldiers to suicide bombers" (The Wall Street Journal, 2002/03/14)
"In short, the targeting of innocents is Mr. Arafat's explicit strategy to address the "grievance" of Israeli occupation. Israel, on the other hand, has pursued a policy of carefully targeting militants, and has been risking its soldiers over the past week to arrest suspects and confiscate weapons in Palestinian towns and refugee camps. Some non-combatants have been killed, but there is no moral equivalence here - certainly not the kind implied by U.S. proposals for monitors to keep peace between the two sides, or by Colin Powell's declaration last week that "if you declare war on the Palestinians and think you can solve the problem by seeing how many Palestinians can be killed, I don't know if that leads us anywhere." The message all this sends Mr. Arafat is unmistakable: Ratchet up suicidal bombings of Israeli civilians, induce a military response, and the U.S. will heavily pressure Israel for concessions.""Two Stubborn Men, and Many Dead" (Amos Oz, The New York Times, 2002/03/12)
A perfect example of the black magic of moral equivalency, not only comparing Arafat to Sharon, but fusing them together: "Sometimes during these nights I see these two men fused into the persona of an ancient warrior, a wicked Nero, amusing himself by playing with fire, laughing savagely while stoking the flames. ... I suspect that even the Siamese twins, Mr. Sharon and Mr. Arafat - I now call them "Mr. Sharafat" - know this. But fear and stagnation stifle them both. They are living under the dominion of a bloodstained past. They are hostages to one another, so much so that the entire historical dynamic of the conflict of the Middle East has become captive to their fears, their immobility." (See also: "The algebra of infinite justice" (Arundhati Roy, The Guardian, 2001/09/29), in which Roy uses the same trick: "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.")"Left Plays Survivor" (Stanley Kurtz, National Review, 2002/03/07)
"Wideman begins with the fact that he is an African American living at the "ground zero" of pervasive American racism: "I'm sorry. I'm an American of African descent, and I can't applaud my president for doing unto foreign others what he's inflicted on me and mine." ... His point is that Bush has cooked up a fraudulent war abroad "to upstage and camouflage the real war at home" (i.e. the "war" of a racist white American society against blacks). Wideman has next to nothing to say about Islamic terrorism. He's preoccupied instead with the cultural and political effects on America of a war with "alarmingly open-ended goals." Bush's "phony war," says Wideman is being waged not "to defend America from an external foe but to homogenize and coerce its citizens under a flag of rabid nationalism." ... We use the word "terrorist," Wideman says, to deny the possibility of "reasoned exchange" with our foes, to project the evil in ourselves onto a despised "Other." Funny, I thought it was the terrorists themselves who'd traded in reasoned exchange for murderous scapegoating.""Creatures of the cultural cringe" (Theodore Dalrymple, The Spectator, from the 2002/02/02 issue)
"Needless to say, the self-hatred of Western intellectuals is not genuine or sincere: they do not really want to beat our supermarkets into souks, as swords into ploughshares (though I must say that, from the human point of view, I personally do prefer souks to supermarkets). Rather, the intellectual’s expression of self-hatred is directed at other Western intellectuals, to prove the self-hater’s broadness of mind, moral superiority and lack of prejudice, and thus earn the approval of his peers. ... When the intellectuals of this country express no admiration for or appreciation of the cultural achievements of their civilisation's past, when only denigration and iconoclasm appear to advance an intellectual's career, when moral stature is measured by the vehemence of denunciation of past or present abuses, real or imagined, it is hardly surprising that Muslims conclude that the West is eminently hateful; it must be, because it hates itself. ... Far from promoting reconciliation and tolerance, therefore, multiculturalism breeds contempt, hatred and violence, especially in places like Tipton, which do not represent the pinnacle of Western achievement. Every multiculturalist is a recruiting officer for al-Qa'eda.""U.S. slams Syria for equating Gaza demolitions, WTC attacks" (Reuters/Haaretz, 2002/01/18)
Moral equivalence Syrian style, equating the demolition of Palestinian houses, used for staging terrorist attacks, with the WTC attacks: "The United States on Friday criticized Syria for equating the September 11 attacks against the World Trade Center with Israel's recent demolition of Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip. A U.S. official told reporters that "the idea of equating the destruction of the World Trade Center and the demolition of homes that has been going on in the territories is outrageous." ... In his debut speech as a new UN Security Council member, Syrian representative Fayssal Mekdad said the 15-member body practiced a double standard in denouncing terrorism around the world but avoiding criticism of Israel. "We must note the scene of tens of Palestinian houses which were demolished by Israeli tanks in the Rafah camps a few days ago is not much different from the scene of the World Trade Center which was destroyed by the terrorists, whom we have all agreed here to combat and eliminate," Mekdad said."
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