"Immoral
equivalency"
"Now that they have lost both the appetite and the capacity for power politics, the Europeans are in the grip of a contradiction. They insist that acts of war can only be justified by moral absolutes. They also insist that we live in a world of moral relativities. ... From this perspective, Saddam may be a bad man, but he is merely a darker shade of grey than Ariel Sharon." (Bruce Anderson)
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 -
August 2002
"Lifestyles of the Poor and Obscure" (Katherine Mangu-Ward, The Weekly Standard, 2002/08/28)
"Columbia U. Prof. excuses suicide "resistance" - An Unanswered Letter to Columbia's Dean of Academic Affairs by Edward Alexander" (Edward Alexander, IMRA, 2002/08/27)
"How they twisted the hawk Kissinger into a fake dove" (Barbara Amiel, The Daily Telegraph, 2002/08/26)
"Teaching 9/11 lies" (George F. Will, New York Post, 2002/08/25)
"Cracks in the wall" (James C. Bennett, UPI, 2002/08/24)
"Of lice and men" (Helene Guldberg, spiked, 2002/08/22)
"The war Bush is losing" (Mark Steyn, The Spectator, from the 2002/08/24 issue)
"Multiculturalists are the real racists" (Mark Steyn, National Post, 2002/08/20)
"For the NEA, history is farce" (The Washington Times, 2002/08/20)
"NEA delivers history lesson" (Ellen Sorokin, The Washington Times, 2002/08/19)
"A complimentary double standard" (Yair Sheleg, Haaretz, 2002/08/11)
"Terror threat overblown, says expert" (Christian Bourge, UPI, 2002/08/10)
"The road to irredentism" (Caroline B. Glick, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/08/09)
"Sophisticated Stupidity" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/08/07)
"Sontagism" (Stefan Kanfer, City Journal, 2002/08/07)
"Justice for Iraqis" (The Daily Telegraph, 2002/08/07)
"The logic of empire" (George Monbiot, The Guardian, 2002/08/06)
"Whatever happened to Amnesty International?" (National Post, 2002/08/06)
"Truth Massacred" (Richard Cohen, The Washington Post, 2002/08/06)
"Stopping the war" (Andrew Sullivan, andrewsullivan.com, 2002/08/01)July 2002
"Flying the Unfriendly Skies" (George McGovern, The Wall Street Journal, 2002/07/29)
"Regime Change in Iran?" (Reuel Marc Gerecht, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/08/05 issue)
"The world according to Ustinov" (Matthew Sweet, Arab News, 2002/07/26)
"Changing Regimes Can Get a Little Tricky" (Nicholas von Hoffman, New York Observer, 2002/07/25)
"Human 'Wrongs'" (Gerald M. Steinberg, National Review, 2002/07/25)
"Tolerating Intolerance: The Challenge of Fundamentalist Islam in Western Europe" (Bruce Bawer, Partisan Review, from the PR3/2002 issue)
"Do not treat Israel like apartheid South Africa" (Ian Buruma, The Guardian, 2002/07/23)
"Treason of the Academics" (Stephen Schwartz, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/07/22)
"Stereotyping and the Decline of Common Sense" (Paul Hollander, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/07/19)
"How the Times wishes history unfolded" (Robert Leiter, Jewish World Review, 2002/07/18)
"Baghdad by Christmas" (Bruce Anderson, The Spectator, from the 2002/07/20 issue)
"Massacre of the truth" (Douglas Davis, The Spectator, from the 2002/07/20 issue)
"Spies Like Us" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/07/15)
"Sontag Award Nominee" (andrewsullivan.com, 2002/07/15)
"European Morality?" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2002/07/12)
"Tales of Canterbury's Future?" (Peter Mullen, The Wall Street Journal, 2002/07/12)
"The Fortunes of Permanence" (Roger Kimball, The New Criterion, from the Summer 2002 issue)
"Communists and Islamic Extremists - Then and Now" (Stephen Schwartz, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/07/08)
"Lifestyles of the Poor and Obscure" (Katherine Mangu-Ward, The Weekly Standard, 2002/08/28)
The end logic of moral relativism II: "The introduction of electricity has caused the "destruction" of cultures in the third world, according the editor of an environmental website. He says "there's a lot of quality to be had in poverty." "I don't think a lot of electricity is a good thing. It is the fuel that powers a lot of multi-national imagery," said Gar Smith, editor of the Earth Island Institute's online journal the Edge, in an interview with CNSNews.com's Marc Morano. "I have seen villages in Africa that had a vibrant culture and great communities that were disrupted and destroyed by the introduction of electricity," Smith said. "People who used to spend their days and evenings in the streets playing music on their own instruments and sewing clothing for their neighbors on foot-pedal powered sewing machines" are now inside their huts watching television. ... Smith goes on to declare that poverty is "relative." He explains that "you can't really have poverty unless you have wealthy people on the scene." One wonders why he hasn't moved to a locale more in tune with the lifestyle he and his friends embrace. There, with no health care, living on a subsistence diet, with a leaky roof over his head, at least he'd have the comfort of knowing he isn't poor." (See also: "Environmentalist Laments Introduction of Electricity" (Marc Morano, CNSNews.com, 2002/08/26) and "What do we really want?" (George Monbiot, The Guardian, 2002/08/27): "But it is impossible not to notice that, in some of the poorest parts of the world, most people, most of the time, appear to be happier than we are. ... This is not to suggest that poverty causes happiness. In southern Ethiopia people desperately want better healthcare, better education, better housing and sanitation, not to mention smart clothes, motorbikes, refrigerators and radios. But while poverty does not cause happiness, there appears to be some evidence that wealth causes misery.")
"Columbia U. Prof. excuses suicide "resistance" - An Unanswered Letter to Columbia's Dean of Academic Affairs by Edward Alexander" (Edward Alexander, IMRA, 2002/08/27)
The end logic of moral relativism I - a Columbia University professor calls The 9/11 attacks and suicide bombings "suicidal resistance" and says there "is no dishonor in such shared and innocent death": "On June 22, Columbia University professor and postmodern theorist Gayatri Spivak gave the keynote address at a conference at the University of Leeds entitled "Translating Class, Altering Hospitality." ... I merely offer a few excerpts from Spivak's keynote speech, on the subject of what she calls "suicidal resistance," to show what currently passes for wisdom in academic circles: 'Suicide bombing - and the planes of 9/11 were living bombs - is a purposive self-annihilation, a confrontation between oneself and oneself, the extreme end of autoeroticism, killing onself as other, in the process killing others. It is when one sees oneself as an object capable of destruction in a world of objects, so that the destruction of others is indistinguishable from the destruction of self. Suicidal resistance is a message inscribed on the body when no other means will get through. It is both execution and mourning, for both self and other. For you die with me for the same cause, no matter which side you are on. Because no matter who you are, there are no designated killees in suicide bombing. No matter what side you are on, because I cannot talk to you, you won't respond to me, with the implication that there is no dishonor in such shared and innocent death.'" (See also the conference website: "CongressCATH 2002: Translating Class, Altering Hospitality" (University of Leed, Summer 2002))
"How they twisted the hawk Kissinger into a fake dove" (Barbara Amiel, The Daily Telegraph, 2002/08/26)
"What has been happening at the Times is far more ominous than just veering to the support of one party or one ideology. ... There is a type of liberalism, pioneered in America, which tries to be fairer than fair. But trying to be better than fair is like trying to bend over backwards to be straighter than vertical or defining "objective" as being neutral between good and evil. That path leads straight to moral equivalence. In the 1980s, this pseudo "objectivity" and "fairness" expressed itself in an impartiality between totalitarian systems and the free world. Currently, it expresses itself in the notion that Palestinian actions against civilians have the same moral legitimacy as those of Israelis against the intifada. ... Super-liberalism has sub-liberal consequences. Because super-liberalism has no reality behind it, the truth has to be distorted. The news has to be re-written or spun to suit the agenda if it involves topics the paper considers of vital ideological importance, such as the unseating of President George W Bush, the prevention of war against Iraq, the creation of a Palestinian state without regard to the security of Israel. Ultimately, in such a wonderland, the super-liberals have to rise to the defence of suicide bombers. Day has to become night. Henry Kissinger must be made into an anti-Bush dove." (See also: "Top Republicans Break With Bush on Iraq Strategy" (Todd S. Purdum and Patrick E. Tyler, The New York Times, 2002/08/16) and "Steps on the way to ousting Saddam from Iraq" (Henry Kissinger, HoustonChronicle, 2002/08/09))
"Teaching 9/11 lies" (George F. Will, New York Post, 2002/08/25)
Will on NEA's suggested lesson plan for the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks: "The results, on the NEA's Web site (www.neahin.org), illustrate three things that make the public education establishment a national menace. One is distrust of parents, whom the NEA obviously considers imbeciles. Another is a politically correct obsession with "diversity" and America's sins. Third, and most repellant, is a therapeutic rather than an educational focus - an emphasis not on learning but on feelings, not on good thinking but on feeling good. ... But should that day really become an exercise in self-absorption? Why should a commemoration of mass murder be an occasion to "feel better?" ... Many NEA ideas defy caricature, such as the suggestion that 12th graders soothe their souls by reading Dr. Seuss books. The NEA represents, and presumably reflects the mentality of, the people who are delivering - inflicting? - public education. That is as frightening, in its way, as any foreign threat." (See also: "NEA delivers history lesson" (Ellen Sorokin, The Washington Times, 2002/08/19))
"Cracks in the wall" (James C. Bennett, UPI, 2002/08/24)
Found via InstaPundit. Bennett on the ideology of "transnational progressivism": "It was the advent of George W. Bush in 2001 that signaled an end to the seeming global unanimity on the progress of the transnational progressive agenda. By withdrawing from or refusing to ratify a number of highly visible international structures, including the Kyoto Agreement, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the International Criminal Court, the Bush administration presented the first substantial threat to the transnational progressive agenda. As a result, the transnational progressive sectors in academia and the media have piled on Bush and America in general (for they are quite aware that Bush's stance on transnational governance is popular) by attacking American "unilateralism." They enjoy painting America as the lone holdout against an otherwise-unanimous consensus of democracies. ... And now cracks are beginning to appear in the wall. Australia is the only other principal Anglosphere nation beside the United States in which a party is in power which is not controlled by transnational progressives. Thus Australia joined the United States in a principled rejection of the Kyoto agreement and has recently rejected international interference in its handling of asylum applicants. Once the crack in the wall begins, it will spread because it depends on the illusion of world consensus." (See also: "The Ideological War Within the West" (John Fonte, Foreign Policy Research Institute, May 2002))
"Of lice and men" (Helene Guldberg, spiked, 2002/08/22)
Anti-humanism taken literally. Guldberg on John Gray's "Stray Dogs:Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals": "According to Granta's publicity material, Straw Dogs by John Gray is 'a demolition of two and a half thousand years of thought'. Apparently, from Plato to Christianity, from the Enlightenment to Marx, the Western tradition has been based on 'arrogant and erroneous beliefs about human beings and their place in the world'. ... Gray argues that the battle today is 'between humanists and the few who understand that humans can no more be masters of their destiny than any other animal'. He claims that the 'human animal' is 'one of the most predatory and destructive' species on Earth.
Worse still, we are subjected endlessly to inane statements from Gray himself - the kind of thing you would hear from a drunken and smug smart alec at a dinner party:
- 'Genocide is as human as art or prayer'
- 'Progress and mass murder run in tandem'
-'Cities are no more artificial than the hives of bees'
- 'The internet is as natural as a spider's web'
- 'Looking for meaning in history is like looking for patterns in clouds.'
... At times the book is breathtaking in its stupidity. According to Gray, 'knowledge does not need minds, or even nervous systems. It is found in all living things'. Apparently bacteria act on 'knowledge' of their environment - by sensing chemical differences, and swimming towards sugar and away from acid - in much the same way as humans do.""The war Bush is losing" (Mark Steyn, The Spectator, from the 2002/08/24 issue)
"I don't think the teachers' union are 'Hate America' types. Very few Americans are. But, rather, they're in thrall to something far craftier than straightforward anti-Americanism - a kind of enervating cult of tolerance in which you demonstrate your sensitivity to other cultures by being almost totally insensitive to your own. ... The Islamists, by contrast, cheerfully piss all over every cherished Western progressive shibboleth. Women? The Taleban didn't just 'marginalise' women, they buried them under sackcloth. But Gloria Steinem still wouldn't support the Afghan war, and Cornell professor Joan Jacobs Brumberg argues that the 'beauty dictates' of American consumer culture exert a far more severe toll on women. Gays? As The New Republic reported this week, the Palestinian Authority tortures homosexuals, makes them stand in sewage up to their necks with faeces-filled sacks on their heads. Yet Canadian MP Svend Robinson, Yasser's favourite gay infidel, still makes his pilgrimages to Ramallah to pledge solidarity with the people's 'struggle'. ... In a unipolar world, it's clear that the real enemy in this war is ourselves, and our lemming-like rush to cultural suicide. ... George W. Bush had a rare opportunity after 11 September. He could have attempted to reverse the most toxic tide in the Western world: the sappy multiculturalism that insists all cultures are equally valid, even as they're trying to kill us. He could have argued that Western self-loathing is a psychosis we can no longer afford." (See also: "NEA delivers history lesson" (Ellen Sorokin, The Washington Times, 2002/08/19) and "Refugee Status" (Yossi Klein Halevi, The New Republic, 2002/08/19))
"Multiculturalists are the real racists" (Mark Steyn, National Post, 2002/08/20)
"Last Thursday, in Sydney, the pack leader of a group of Lebanese Muslim gang-rapists was sentenced to 55 years in jail. ... During their gang rapes, the lucky lady would be told she was about to be "f---ed Leb style" and that she deserved it because she was an "Australian pig." But, inevitably, it's the heavy sentence that's "controversial." After September 11th, Americans were advised to ask themselves, "Why do they hate us?" Now Australians need to ask themselves, "Why do they rape us?" As Monroe Reimers put it on the letters page of The Sydney Morning Herald: "As terrible as the crime was, we must not confuse justice with revenge. We need answers. Where has this hatred come from? How have we contributed to it? Perhaps it's time to take a good hard look at the racism by exclusion practised with such a vengeance by our community and cultural institutions." ... What's interesting is how easily even this most extreme manifestation of multiculturalism is subsumed within the usual pieties. ... Lebanese male immigrants, fleeing a war-torn wasteland and finding refuge in a land of peace, freedom and opportunity, are inevitably transformed into gang rapists by Australian racism. ... ...multiculturalism means that the worst attributes of Muslim culture - the subjugation of women - combine with the worst attributes of Western culture - licence and self-gratification. ... Yet even in the face of the crudest assaults on its most cherished causes - women's rights, gay rights - the political class turns squeamishly away." (Note: Steyn also provides this interesting statistic - "Islam For All reported the other day that, at present demographic rates, in 20 years' time the majority of Holland's children (the population under 18) will be Muslim. It will be the first Islamic country in western Europe since the loss of Spain.")
"For the NEA, history is farce" (The Washington Times, 2002/08/20)
"The nation's largest teachers' union has essentially used the September 11 massacre to peddle its own version of moral equivalency. And when it becomes impossible to avoid assessing blame, the reliably left-wing union recommends pointing the finger at the United States in a classic blame-America-first fusillade. NEA staff have apparently busied themselves this summer preparing lesson plans cautioning teachers not to "suggest any group is responsible" for the terrorist airliner hijackings that led to the massacre of more than 3,000 innocent people on American soil on September 11. "Blaming is especially difficult in terrorist situations," the NEA bemoans, "because someone is at fault." Yes, the wholesale murder of thousands of innocents does tend to cause some to become obsessed with finding the blameworthy perpetrators." (See also: "NEA delivers history lesson" (Ellen Sorokin, The Washington Times, 2002/08/19))"NEA delivers history lesson" (Ellen Sorokin, The Washington Times, 2002/08/19)
"The National Education Association is suggesting to teachers that they be careful on the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks not to "suggest any group is responsible" for the terrorist hijackings that killed more than 3,000 people. Suggested lesson plans compiled by the NEA recommend that teachers "address the issue of blame factually," noting: "Blaming is especially difficult in terrorist situations because someone is at fault. In this country, we still believe that all people are innocent until solid, reliable evidence from our legal authorities proves otherwise." But another of the suggested NEA lesson plans - compiled together under the title "Remember September 11" and appearing on the teachers union health information network Web site - takes a decidedly blame-America approach, urging educators to "discuss historical instances of American intolerance," so that the American public avoids 'repeating terrible mistakes.'" (See also: "Remember September 11" (NEA, August 2002) and "Teaching Tolerance for Terror" (Little Green Footballs, 2002/08/19))
"A complimentary double standard" (Yair Sheleg, Haaretz, 2002/08/11)
Professor Adi Ophir, "an instructor in philosophy at Tel Aviv University and founder/editor of Theory and Criticism," thinks Israel "deserve much more severe steps" than Milosevic' regime in former Yugoslavia: "If Europe were free of the shadow of anti-Semitism, and could stand up to Israel the way it did to Yugoslavia in the 1990s, I'm sure the criticism, and the practical steps, would be much more severe; and justifiably so, since we deserve much more severe steps. Maybe not NATO bombings, though if things go on as they are, perhaps that will come, but steps taken, for example, against South Africa - sanctions and pressure of all kind." Nonetheless, don't the leftists who are critical of Israel have to fight the anti-Semitism that Ophir admits exists? 'When anti-Semitism is exploited to silence criticism, I can understand ignoring it, because then you are playing the game of silencing the critics.'" (See also: "The charges against Milosevic" (BBC News, 2002/02/08), for a survey of the indictments against him: "It cites the July 1995 massacre at Srebrenica, where 'almost all captured Bosnian Muslim men and boys, altogether several thousands, were executed at the places where they had been captured or at sites to which they had been transported for execution.'")"Terror threat overblown, says expert" (Christian Bourge, UPI, 2002/08/10)
According to Roger Congleton "the statistical reality" makes the September 11 attacks comparable to highway accidents: "'I basically think we are really overreacting to this in a fairly large way,' said George Mason University economist Roger Congleton. "I think it would be useful for the press and the government to be reminded that the risks are not as gigantic as we seem to have been encouraged to believe over the last year." ... Congleton says that the risks of dying in more ordinary crimes or accidents - being run over by a car, killed in the traffic accident while driving, or even being murdered - are much higher than those of being killed in a terrorist act. ... Congleton says the drama of the Sept. 11 attacks makes the overreaction understandable but that the statistical reality of the terror threat should be the key to allocating resources. "When you have 3,000 people killed at once it is a very shocking and trying event, but that many people were killed in highway accidents in September 2001," said Congleton. 'This is no less shocking for the people who lost loved ones.'" (Note: Rabbi Lerner used the same analogy to downplay the threat of suicide bombings - "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." ("Radical Jewish Left reaches new low in morality - adopts 'traffic accident' standard - murder of 149 termed 'almost nonexistent terror'" (IMRA, 2002/04/05))"The road to irredentism" (Caroline B. Glick, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/08/09)
"How did it come to pass that Yassra Bakri, a 20-year-old Israeli Arab nursing student at Safed College, and her girlfriend, Samiya Asedi, another Israeli Arab student, said nothing for 20 minutes about the presence of a mass murderer on a No. 361 Egged bus this past Sunday morning? ... According to Moti Zaken, Internal Security Minister Uzi Landau's Arab affairs adviser, much of this extremist trend is the result of work by Arab non-governmental organizations that were founded over the last decade. ... One of the most active and most successful of these organizations is Adala, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. ... In a report submitted to the Amman NGO networking meeting for the UN World Conference Against Racism in February 2001, Adala claimed that in Israel, "Racism exists at almost every level of society." At Durban itself, Adala was a central force in the NGO conference, where Israel was defined to be "a racist apartheid state in which Israel's brand of apartheid is a crime against humanity." ... The widespread legitimacy given to Adala's advocacy of the notion that Israel is a racist state whose very self-definition as a Jewish state is wrong, paves the way for monstrous behavior like that of Bakri and Assedi on the No. 361 bus. After all, if the goal is irredentism, what possible responsibility should they have toward citizens of the state that they are taught to consider illegitimate and racist?" (See also: "Israeli Arab nursing student charged for failure to warn of bus bombing" (The Jerusalem Post, 2002/08/07))"Sophisticated Stupidity" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/08/07)
"George Orwell is said to have observed that some ideas are so stupid, only an intellectual could believe them. A wonderful example comes from columnist James Carroll in the Boston Globe. Carroll uses yesterday's anniversary of the nuking of Hiroshima to argue that Saddam Hussein is no worse than America. ... "If we used the nuclear weapon as much to send a signal to the Soviet Union as to end World War II, then all the wickedness unfolding from that use - not only the arms race, but the demonic new idea that national power can properly depend on the threat of mass destruction - belongs to us. If Saddam Hussein wants weapons of mass destruction for the sake of the strategic diplomatic power they will give him, he is playing by rules written in Washington." This is like arguing that cops have guns, so we shouldn't begrudge them to criminals. In Carroll's blinkered view, there is no moral distinction between America - which ultimately used the power of its nuclear weapons to liberate the Soviet Union and most of its world-wide empire from communism - and Saddam's Iraq, a barbaric regime whose raison d'être is the glorification and enrichment of a murderous lunatic." (See also: "A mistake and a crime" (James Carroll, The Boston Globe, 2002/07/06))"Sontagism" (Stefan Kanfer, City Journal, 2002/08/07)
Kanfer on Susan Sontag - "The queen of knee-jerk anti-Americanism strikes again": "The occasion: the Lincoln Center Festival production of three traditional Iranian plays. ... The plays concerned child martyrdom - indeed, one ended with the bloody beheading of a ten-year-old—and during a post-production symposium Sontag congratulated the festival director for importing the dramas to the U.S. "You've done something incredible," she burbled. "To view these works was a privilege and a duty for us who don't live by the contemptible rhetoric of the Bush administration. The last thing in the world we want to do is cooperate with the jihadist mentality of this administration." ... Manifestly, Sontag did not intend to imply that George W. Bush had converted to Islam. She meant that the present U.S. government was as zealous and vengeful as . . . but the lady preferred not to connect the dots." (See also: "First Reactions" (Susan Sontag, The New Yorker, 2001/09/17))"Justice for Iraqis" (The Daily Telegraph, 2002/08/07)
"The future Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has signed the Pax Christi declaration on the "legality and morality of war against Iraq" that was presented at Number 10 yesterday. ... There is much muddled thinking here. It is not "the most powerful nations" that regard war as acceptable; rather, it is smaller tyrannical nations such as Iraq, unfettered by such forms of accountability, that treat war as an "acceptable" instrument of policy. ... But the worst aspect of the petition is its moral equilateralism. Massive Iraqi atrocities are acknowledged, but the West's role is treated as being at least as bad. Indeed, the emotional force behind the statement is mainly directed at the West for murdering thousands of Iraqi children. Even if this were true - and it is not - it would scarcely be a matter of deliberate policy as it is with Saddam." (See also: "Clergy protest against war on Iraq" (BBC News, 2002/08/06))"The logic of empire" (George Monbiot, The Guardian, 2002/08/06)
Or, rather, "The logic of neo-Marxist anti-Americanism": "There is something almost comical about the prospect of George Bush waging war on another nation because that nation has defied international law. Since Bush came to office, the United States government has torn up more international treaties and disregarded more UN conventions than the rest of the world has in 20 years. ... Even its preparedness to go to war with Iraq without a mandate from the UN security council is a defiance of international law far graver than Saddam Hussein's non-compliance with UN weapons inspectors. ... As the US government discovers that it can threaten and attack other nations with impunity, it will surely soon begin to threaten countries that have numbered among its allies. As its insatiable demand for resources prompts ever bolder colonial adventures, it will come to interfere directly with the strategic interests of other quasi-imperial states. ... To accept that the US presents a danger to the rest of the world would be to acknowledge the need to resist it. ... And we should cross our fingers and hope that a combination of economic mismanagement, gangster capitalism and excessive military spending will reduce America's power to the extent that it ceases to use the rest of the world as its doormat.""Whatever happened to Amnesty International?" (National Post, 2002/08/06)
"But in practice, AI has begun to fritter away its well-earned moral capital on fashionable causes that have nothing to do with any of these issues. For instance, some of AI's supporters were alienated when the group supported last year's disastrous UN "anti-racism" conference in Durban, South Africa. Of all the nations in the Middle East, Israel has by far the most humane and civilized justice system. Yet in Durban, Amnesty International singled out Israel for special blame. And the group refused to walk out on the proceedings even when the NGO conference degenerated into a festival of unvarnished anti-Semitism. ... The broader question is this: Given AI's mandate and limited resources, why is the group wasting its time and resources complaining about inconvenienced lobster thugs and "stereotyped" refugees when people are being butchered and railroaded en masse in places like Angola, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia? The answer is that it has become more politically fashionable to sniff for racism in the First World than to hunt for torture in the Third. Like Human Rights Watch and other brand-name NGOs, AI has been tempted away from its original mandate, and now fritters away its credibility attacking Zionism, globalization and the West.""Truth Massacred" (Richard Cohen, The Washington Post, 2002/08/06)
"But the readiness, the alacrity, with which some in the West stand ready to judge Israel by standards they would not apply elsewhere - and which are routinely violated in the Arab world -- is downright repellent. The hard truth is that Israel could sharply reduce its Palestinian problem by sharply reducing the number of Palestinians - push them out. This is how Czechoslovakia got rid of its Germans after World War II. And an immense swap of populations accompanied the partition of Pakistan and India. In other words, it has been done. A heartbreaking tragedy is being played out in the Middle East. Two peoples, convinced of the righteousness of their cause, are struggling for the same piece of land. But one engages in the inhumane murder of civilians while the other strives, sometimes vainly, to retain its humanity. This, too, is a fact - one that often gets obscured by the din of propaganda. Jenin is an example of that. What got massacred there was not Palestinians but truth itself.""Stopping the war" (Andrew Sullivan, andrewsullivan.com, 2002/08/01)
"The London Times' Simon Jenkins sneers at the notion that Iraq is a threat to Britain or America. He describes the military campaigns in Serbia and Afghanistan as failures. He describes post-9/11 American foreign policy as "catatonic." He likens Tony Blair to the premier of an East European state under Soviet tyranny. This isn't in the Guardian or the Independent, it's in the Times. But here's the classic sentence: "If the Government is right and al-Qaeda remains a threat to Britain the more reason for caution in the minefields of Middle East politics. It is a reason for listening and watching, not blundering into the region with bombs and tanks." You can't get a more concise description of appeasement than that. Don't fight back, because it could make them even angrier! Just listen and watch - exactly what the peaceniks urged on the West in the 1930s and throughout the Cold War and throughout the 1990s." (See also: "If we must go to war, for God's sake tell us why" (Simon Jenkins, The Times, 2002/07/31))"Flying the Unfriendly Skies" (George McGovern, The Wall Street Journal, 2002/07/29)
The former Democratic presidential nominee on the hassles of flying in the U.S. post-9/11. It's rather thought-provoking, except for the last paragraph, where he accuses Bush of "airport terrorism": "But deep inside I'll never yield to the airport terrorism that President Bush has imposed on us as his answer to Osama bin Laden. I'm willing to shoot bin Laden. I'd even volunteer to fly a bomber against him if we had any idea of what country he is in. But I'm not willing to let fear of Osama bin Laden weaken our civil rights and convert our airports into police-state nightmares.""Regime Change in Iran?" (Reuel Marc Gerecht, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/08/05 issue)
"Children of the left, the Clintonites by and large could not free themselves of a basic tenet of tiers-mondisme: The injection of Western thought into the bloodstream of foreign cultures is somehow illicit. ... Liberal, secularized Christians and Jews who wouldn't hesitate to dissect the political nature of Christianity and Judaism avoided turning the same acumen towards the Middle East's last great monotheism. ... President Clinton went further - further certainly than any president has ever gone in trying to elevate apologia into diplomacy. He apologized for everything. He apologized not only for us, but for the entire West. President Clinton expressed his highest ideals as a form of international therapy. In an amazing, off-the-cuff speech in April 1999, the president gave us his formula for Middle Eastern conflict resolution: 'Iran has been ... a subject of quite a lot of abuse from various Western nations. ... It's quite important to tell people: Look, you have a right to be angry at something my country or my culture or others that are generally allied with us today did to you 50 or 60 or 100 or 150 years ago.'""The world according to Ustinov" (Matthew Sweet, Arab News, 2002/07/26)
An interview with the actor Peter Ustinov, who apparently can't see any difference between Palestinian suicide bombers and the U.S. military. Here Ustinov is "quibbling with George W. Bush's description of Palestinian bombers as 'cowardly'": "They require the kind of courage that none of us would have. It's a kind of courage that’s very hard to understand. And it's our duty to try to understand it because it is the courage of desperation. And what is the difference between somebody who goes into a coffee house with the intention of killing as many people as possible - and does so - and somebody who's in an aeroplane at the height of five miles, unobtainable by any anti-aircraft gun, and lets their bombs drop as scientifically as possible, in order to kill as few people as possible? I guarantee that the one who tries to kill as few people as possible will kill many more than the one who goes into a snack bar and blows himself or herself up. But in this campaign, I wonder how many of the people who have been killed were terrorists? I think very, very few. To my mind, it's a big lie.""Changing Regimes Can Get a Little Tricky" (Nicholas von Hoffman, New York Observer, 2002/07/25)
I guess von Hoffman's piece should be read as satire, but - to paraphrase Ian Buruma - it really says more about himself than anything else: "The next episode of that laff-riot, the Arab-Israeli tussle, is entitled Operation Vidkun. A word of explanation: Please recall that in the previous episode, Marcus Aurelius Bush published a Presidential rescript decreeing that regime change be imposed on Yasir Arafat. ... Immediately prior to his being found guilty of high treason, Vidkun had served with a certain distinction (he sent no fewer than 1,000 Jews to their deaths) as premier of Norway, not so much elected by the Norwegian people as sponsored by Adolf Hitler. For a time in the mid-20th century, the very name Quisling was synonymous for a puppet governor. So, gang, let's spread out and find an Arabic Vidkun and stick him in there. ... The other way to go about settling this whole thing is based on a known geological fact, which is why most of the oil is to be found where the Ayrabs are. Science has shown that when Ayrabs die, they don't go to dust like Christians and Jews. They turn to oil. One dead Ayrab will give you about three-quarters of a barrel of sweet crude, assuming the dead Ayrab in question is a full-grown adult; your yield on a dead Ayrab baby is going to be less. You need to expect that. This scientific geological fact has public-policy implications, as they say, and may explain why President Bush is keeping the United States out of that infernal International Criminal Court." (See also: "Why Are We In Afghanistan?" (Nicholas von Hoffman, The New York Observer, 2001/11/14), a column which made Andrew Sullivan introduce the "Von Hoffman Award" for the "most prophetically challenged pieces of media war-wisdom so far".)"Human 'Wrongs'" (Gerald M. Steinberg, National Review, 2002/07/25)
"The accidental deaths of a number of Palestinian children resulting from the Israeli strike against the building in which Hamas terror leader Salah Shehadeh took refuge in the middle of Gaza City was a tragic error. But from the chorus, composed of the self-styled "international community" - the U.N., the media, human-rights NGOs, and European desk-wise diplomats - Israel's efforts to defend itself constitute a moral crime of the gravest magnitude. If anyone needed further evidence of the ethical depravity of this chorus, these condemnations provide it. ... The inability to distinguish between aggressors, who show no concern for human life, and the defenders, whose goal is to preserve the sanctity of these lives, constitutes the fundamental moral failure of our time. The same chorus kicked in automatically when allied bombs went astray in the war against Saddam Hussein (i.e. when civilians housed below a military facility were killed); in Serbia in the effort to defend Kosovo against Milosevic; and again in Afghanistan following bin Laden's mega-terror attacks on September 11. ... In each of these cases, the moral burden of the loss of innocent lives falls directly on the terrorists and their supporters, including those who provide ideological support, funds, and cover.""Tolerating Intolerance: The Challenge of Fundamentalist Islam in Western Europe" (Bruce Bawer, Partisan Review, from the PR3/2002 issue)
A must-read article, which I found via Andrew Sullivan: "Then, in September 2001 (only five days, in fact, before the destruction of the World Trade Center), the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet reported that 65 percent of rapes of Norwegian women were performed by "non-Western" immigrants – a category that, in Norway, consists mostly of Muslims. The article quoted a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo (who was described as having "lived for many years in Muslim countries") as saying that "Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes" because Muslim men found their manner of dress provocative. One reason for the high number of rapes by Muslims, explained the professor, was that in their native countries "rape is scarcely punished," since Muslims "believe that it is women who are responsible for rape." The professor's conclusion was not that Muslim men living in the West needed to adjust to Western norms, but the exact opposite: "Norwegian women must realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it." It is in such ways that freedoms begin to erode." (See also: "Mener norske jenter frister til sex" (Mark S. Berger, Dagbladet, 2001/09/06), for the original article in Norwegian. Thanks to Norwegian Blogger for the link.)"Do not treat Israel like apartheid South Africa" (Ian Buruma, The Guardian, 2002/07/23)
Buruma on an article by Steven and Hilary Rose, calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions: "The significant thing about their article was the comparison of Israel and South Africa. They cited the success of "civil society" expressing its "moral outrage" by boycotting South Africa. And they mentioned the number of people they knew who felt that "cooperating with Israeli institutions was like collaborating with the apartheid regime". They are quite correct: a lot of people do think that. Israel, in many respects, has become the South Africa of today. It is the litmus test of one's progressive credentials. If you are on the left, you can be friendly with Jews, you can be a Jew, but you cannot be on the side of Israel. ... And yet the comparison with South Africa is intellectually lazy, morally questionable, and possibly even mendacious. ... Far more Muslims have been killed or tortured by the Indian army than by the Israeli defence forces. Dozens of Kashmiri victims - the number of people killed in Jenin - would not even reach the news. And if you think Kashmir is brutal, what about Chechnya? But India and Russia are not litmus tests. Moral outrage against their governments is not a badge of being progressive. No one is proposing a boycott of universities in Delhi or St Petersburg. I can think of one or two reasons for these double standards, but whatever they are, I believe that they tell us more about the boycotters than about the subjects of their rage." (Note: Thanks to Vitali Fridliand for the pointer.)"Treason of the Academics" (Stephen Schwartz, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/07/22)
"Kramer's book makes a point that could be applied to the entire academic social science field in the West today: the ideologization of Middle East studies led to so-called "scholars" apologizing for or ignoring the rise of Islamic extremism. ... The ideological sclerosis of the American social science field is nearly absolute. ... Who writes honestly from the American academy on the Vietnam war, the so-called McCarthy era, anti-Communist labor unionism in America? The list of obscured, ignored, and deliberately confused topics is so long as to be dismaying to consider. ... I have special knowledge of this because my new book, The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror, documents perhaps the most outrageous academic, media, and political coverup of modern times: the willful campaign to suppress worldwide awareness of the violent extremism harbored by the Wahhabi death cult, the official Islamic sect in Saudi Arabia. Wahhabism is not a subject that drew much attention from MESA, at least before September 11. ... The topic is either absent or the cult is treated with the greatest respect.""Stereotyping and the Decline of Common Sense" (Paul Hollander, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/07/19)
"The precipitous decline of common sense in our times, associated with a politically correct solicitousness toward some minorities was also revealed in the recent case of a Muslim woman in Florida who insisted on her right to wear the type of veil (niqab) that covered her entire face except her eyes in the photograph used in her driver's license. The picture, needless to say, is completely useless for the purpose it is supposed to serve, namely the visual identification of the driver. ... The Florida case makes it clear that multiculturalism carried to its logical, politically correct conclusion is incompatible with the existence of a modern secular society in which the laws apply equally to everybody regardless their religious beliefs. By the same token the pretense that everybody flying, or hanging around nuclear power plants has an equal likelihood of committing terrorism is as absurd as to insist that no differences exist among the many human groups, or that members of particular social, national or ethnic groups have nothing in common. At the root of both of these beliefs we find the type of multiculturalism that harbors relentless hostility toward American society and Western values and extends sympathy to every group that questions or rejects these values.""How the Times wishes history unfolded" (Robert Leiter, Jewish World Review, 2002/07/18)
An example of the insidiousness of the use of moral equivalency, which, while purportedly maintaining that both sides are on the same level, often jumps to the conclusion that the side thus levelled with the other is the truly morally inferior (i.e. if the USA and Afghanistan under the Taliban are morally equivalent, never mind the absurdity of that claim, it leaves the world's only superpower callously bombarding one of world's poorest countries. This logic is at the heart of chomskyite reasoning.):
"An article by John Kifner in the July 10 issue of The New York Times contains the single most alarming and mendacious statement yet to appear in media accounts of the recent warfare in Israel. The piece was about the closing by the Israelis of Dr. Sari Nusseibeh's Jerusalem office. The government's contention is that Nusseibeh, often described as a voice of moderation, was serving as an agent of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority and using his university office as a base. The troubling sentence came in the third paragraph of the story and referred to the warrant the Israelis used, which we were told was written in Hebrew and said that "the office was operating in violation of the Oslo accords, though the Israeli Army has virtually obliterated the accords in recent weeks by reoccupying seven West Bank cities that were under Palestinian control." ...
Yasser Arafat has not held to any of the agreements he initialed on Sept. 13, 1993, when on the White House lawn and in front of the whole world he vowed to be a partner for peace. ... Even more important is the fact that no actions the Israelis have taken thus far in their efforts to secure the safety of their citizens constitute an infraction of the Oslo accords - except it seems in the eyes of several reporters and editors at The New York Times.""Baghdad by Christmas" (Bruce Anderson, The Spectator, from the 2002/07/20 issue)
"Now that they have lost both the appetite and the capacity for power politics, the Europeans are in the grip of a contradiction. They insist that acts of war can only be justified by moral absolutes. They also insist that we live in a world of moral relativities. European governments had a double quarrel with Mr Bush's 'axis of evil' speech. They do not believe in the axis. Nor do they believe in the evil. They prefer to live in a world as depicted by Whistler, in which everything is a subtle symphony of endless grey. From this perspective, Saddam may be a bad man, but he is merely a darker shade of grey than Ariel Sharon. ... With Saddam, there is a difference. A man of such evil intentions cannot be allowed to acquire the capability to use weapons of mass destruction. There will be risks in preventing him; we are about to enter a most dangerous period in world history. But those risks are manageable, and ultimately containable. The risks of allowing him access to terrible weaponry are unmanageable and uncontainable.""Massacre of the truth" (Douglas Davis, The Spectator, from the 2002/07/20 issue)
"When [Yasser Arafat] appeared before a special session of the UN General Assembly in Geneva in 1988, I was not surprised that the delegates rose to applaud him. You expect that from diplomats. But that evening, arriving three hours late for a press conference in the UN building, I was shocked that all my colleagues gave him a whooping, standing ovation. Here, surely, was a boy band's lead singer meeting the fans, rather than a terrorist leader about to renounce terrorism. ... Today, his cheerleaders in Europe, having silently acquiesced in his corruption, despotism and brutality, stand on the sidelines, weakly crying foul at the reviled George W. Bush, who has effectively brought down the House of Arafat by demanding that the Palestinians clean up their act and elect new and different leaders whom the Israelis can trust. ... It was in the rubble of the Jenin refugee camp that Arafat played his final hand, and it was there that Europe was eventually shamed by its condescending acquiescence (a genuine hallmark of racism) towards the Palestinians. This time a global television audience, augmented by the UN Security Council, national governments and human-rights organisations, was on the spot to witness Arafat in full, fantastic flight - and Europe's enthusiastic complicity.""Spies Like Us" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/07/15)
"An alarming revelation by one Ritt Goldstein in today's Sydney Morning Herald: "The Bush Administration aims to recruit millions of United States citizens as domestic informants in a program likely to alarm civil liberties groups. The Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS, means the US will have a higher percentage of citizen informants than the former East Germany through the infamous Stasi secret police." Yikes, we're a police state! But a look at the Citizens Corps Web site shows that Goldstein is simply being hysterical: "Operation TIPS - the Terrorism Information and Prevention System - will be a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity. ... Every participant in this new program will be given an Operation TIPS information sticker to be affixed to the cab of their vehicle or placed in some other public location so that the toll-free reporting number is readily available." Sounds more like Neighborhood Watch than the Stasi - and indeed, Neighborhood Watch is another program of the Citizens Corps." (See also: "US planning to recruit one in 24 Americans as citizen spies" (Ritt Goldstein, Sydney Morning Herald, 2002/07/15) and "Operation TIPS" (Citizen Corps, Summer 2002))"Sontag Award Nominee" (andrewsullivan.com, 2002/07/15)
Sullivan quotes a column by the British chomskyite John Pilger, combining the usual mix of topsy-turvy moral equivalence and conspiracy theorizing: "Having swept the Palestinians into the arms of the supreme terrorist Ariel Sharon, the Christian Right fundamentalists running the plutocracy in Washington, now replenish their arsenal in preparation for an attack on the 22 million suffering people of Iraq. Should anyone need reminding, Iraq is a nation held hostage to an American-led embargo every bit as barbaric as the dictatorship over which Iraqis have no control. Contrary to propaganda orchestrated from Washington and London, the coming attack has nothing to do with Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction', if these exist at all. The reason is that America wants a more compliant thug to run the world's second greatest source of oil." (See also: "The great charade" (John Pilger, The Observer, 2002/07/14))"European Morality?" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2002/07/12)
"We in the United States have this unpleasant suspicion that the record of European jurisprudence - more scrutiny and concern given to those caught on the battlefield and detained in Cuba than to the Sept. 11 terrorists who planned their murdering while roaming free in Europe - is both biased and opportunistic. Europe will go after a decrepit Pinochet when he flies thousands of miles from home in his dotage, but wait years to do much about a robust and dangerous Milosevic right next door who killed more in a month than Pinochet did in a lifetime. It will lecture the United States, which is a civilized and humane state, about everything from its death penalty to internment of prisoners of war, but say nothing about real murder that is a daily occurrence in China and much of the Arab world. ... The Europeans have more important security worries than errant American soldiers - such as terrorism and rising anti-Semitism. But if they are worried about issues of morality and law, they should look to their own immediate past and round up all the present legions of ex-communist officials and fellow-travelers still safe in their midst who just a few years ago brought misery and death to millions.""Tales of Canterbury's Future?" (Peter Mullen, The Wall Street Journal, 2002/07/12)
Mullen on archbishop Rowan Williams, who is likely to become the next archbishop of Canterbury: "As it happens, he was in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, at a conference on spirituality. He has given us his reflections on the atrocities in a booklet titled "Writing in the Sand," published late last year. ... The archbishop wants us to "understand" the terrorists' motives. "We have something of the freedom to consider whether or not we turn to violence and so, in virtue of that very fact, are rather different from those who experience their world as leaving no other option." But this is cant. Of course the suicide bombers had "other options": Not every Muslim thinks that the only answer to his problems is to destroy New York. ... Once we have admitted that the atrocity was not the terrorists' fault, what next? "We begin to find some sense of what they and we might together recognise as good." Really? But how to make common moral cause between democracy's rule of law and nihilistic killing? Do sit down Osama. Have another éclair while we discuss the terms of trade. ... Dr. Williams is often described here as something of a saint. In fact, he is an old-fashioned class warrior, a typical bien-pensant despiser of Western capitalism and the way of life that goes with it.""The Fortunes of Permanence" (Roger Kimball, The New Criterion, from the Summer 2002 issue)
"What we see in contemporary culture is relativism with a vengeance. It is a directed, activist relativism, forgiving and nonjudgmental about anything hostile to the perpetuation of traditional Western culture, full of self-righteous retribution when it comes to individuals and institutions friendly to the West. It incubates what Mark Steyn described above as "the slyer virus": "the vague sense that the West's success must somehow be responsible for the rest's failure." ... The attack on permanence is a failure of principle that results in moral paralysis. Chesterton once defined madness as "using mental activity so as to reach mental helplessness." That is an apt description of a process we see at work in many segments of our social and intellectual life. It is not so much a version of Hamlet's disease - being sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought - as an example of what happens when conscience is no longer animated by principle and belief. ... September 11 precipitated a crisis the end of which we cannot see. Part of the task that faces us now is to acknowledge the depth of barbarism that challenges the survival of culture. And part of that acknowledgment lies in reaffirming the core values that are under attack. Ultimately, victory in the conflict that besieges us will be determined not by smart weapons but by smart heads. That is to say, the conflict is not so much - not only - military conflict as a conflict of world views.""Communists and Islamic Extremists - Then and Now" (Stephen Schwartz, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/07/08)
"America's capacity to defend itself spiritually and intellectually had been deeply harmed by "anti-anti-Communism." The legacy of this deviation in American political life is audible whenever the claim is made that firm measures against terrorists - the use before September 11 of "secret evidence," or, after that date, denying terror troopers status as prisoners of war, investigating extremist activities that sheltered under the cover of religion, more efficient standards for wiretapping, detention of aliens, higher levels of transportation and communications security, or the failure to provide "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh with a "dream team" of lawyers in the Afghan hinterland - threatened to put America on the terrorists' level. America was told repeatedly it must fight for protection of the rights of its enemies if it was not to become indistinguishable from them. Similarly, apologists for Bin Laden and his accomplices insisted that evidence of his terrorist activities, satisfying absurdly high standards, must be produced before action could be taken against him."
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