"Immoral
equivalency"
"Here is our decadence: not the nightclubs, not the beaches and the sex and the drugs, but our incapacity to believe we have been wronged. Our lack of self-worth." (Howard Jacobson)
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 -
October 2002
"Simon sez" (Bret Stephens, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/10/31)
"The Left's Odd Man Out" (Edward W. Lempinen, Salon.com/FrontPageMagazine, 2002/10/31)
"Watson lecturer calls for pacifist response to terrorism" (Monique Meneses, The Brown Daily Herald, 2002/10/30)
"Preaching Politics" (Jason L. Steorts, The Harvard Crimson, 2002/10/28)
"12 Americans Stage Protest Hussein Is Happy to Allow" (John F. Burns, The New York Times, 2002/10/27)
"US peace marches draw thousands" (BBC News, 2002/10/26)
"The Power of Facing" (Elizabeth Wasserman, The Atlantic, 2002/10/23)
"Choking in the stink of our own self-hatred" (Howard Jacobson, Independent, 2002/10/19)
"Bleeding hearts left exposed as fools" (Gerard Henderson, The Sydney Morning Herald, 2002/10/14)
"Left Behind" (Jonathan V. Last, The Weekly Standard, 2002/10/11)
"Why Israel and not Sudan, is singled out" (Charles Jacobs, The Boston Globe, 2002/10/05)
"Stupidity Watch" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/10/02)
"Susan Sontag Award" (andrewsullivan.com, 2002/10/02)
"Saddam's Patsies" (George F. Will, New York Post, 2002/10/01)September 2002
"You've Lost Your Way, Baby" (Catherine Seipp, Reason, from the October 2002 issue)
"Protesters turn to thoughts of Iraq" (Kevin Anderson, BBC News, 2002/09/30)
"Democratic Congressman Asserts Bush Would Mislead U.S. on Iraq" (John H. Cushman Jr., The New York Times, 2002/09/30)
"Marching off to peace" (Ken Loach, The Observer, 2002/09/22)
"Left Behind" (George Packer, The New York Times Magazine, 2002/09/22)
"The Fog of Peace" (David Brooks, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/09/30 issue)
"Pacifism is disguised timidity" (Elizabeth Nickson, National Post, 2002/09/20)
"U.S. Slams German Minister for Bush-Hitler Comment" (Reuters, 2002/09/19)
"Activists prepare anti-war campaign" (Brian Wheeler, BBC News, 2002/09/18)
"The Indymedia Kids" (Glenn Reynolds, InstaPundit, 2002/09/14)
"The Roots of European Appeasement" (David Gelernter, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/09/23 issue)
"Don't Expect Anything Else" (Charles Johnson, Little Green Footballs, 2002/09/13)
"The Great Refutation" (George F. Will, The Washington Post, 2002/09/11)
"Lock them up first: how liberalism begets fascism" (Theodore Dalrymple, The Daily Telegraph, 2002/09/10)
"Real Battles and Empty Metaphors" (Susan Sontag, The New York Times, 2002/09/10)
"Tribute to the towers" (Linda Herrick, The New Zeeland Herald, 2002/09/09)
"Mugabe's final solution" (Paul Craig Roberts, The Washington Times, 2002/09/09)
"Church leaders speak against 'wicked' war" (Ruth Gledhill and Phillip Webster, The Times, 2002/09/05)
"Powell Jeered" (Andrew Sullivan, andrewsullivan.com, 2002/09/04)
"Simon sez" (Bret Stephens, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/10/31)
Stephens on Reporters sans Frontières new worldwide press freedom index, where the Palestinian Authority scores better than Israel: "So, for that matter, do Lebanon, Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic, and Chad. This, too, is no surprise. Earlier this year, the Committee to Protect Journalists, ordinarily a reputable organization, produced its own hatchet job on Israel, accusing the IDF of using "threats, intimidation and, in some cases, potentially lethal force to prevent journalists from covering its military operations." But that was small beer next to the RSF report, which goes out of its way to single out Ariel Sharon as a press "predator" worse than the likes of Iran's Ali Khamenei, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Cuba's Fidel Castro, Libya's Gaddafi, and Kirsan Iloumjinov of the Kalmykia Republic (of whom and of which, I confess, I had never heard). So scratch another name from the list of benign-sounding NGOs worthy of your $15 of charity. To take one example, Lebanon is a country in which journalist Raghida Degham was recently prosecuted in a military court merely for participating in a Washington, DC panel discussion at which an Israeli official was present. Yet Lebanon comes in at #56 on the RSF report, against Israel's #92. As for the Palestinian Authority, it would be tedious here to recite its record of violent abuse - including murder, intimidation, confiscation of equipment and so on - of foreign and local journalists. Yet the PA comes in at #82." (See also: "Reporters Without Borders is publishing the first worldwide press freedom index" (Reporters sans Frontières, 2002/10/23))"The Left's Odd Man Out" (Edward W. Lempinen, Salon.com/FrontPageMagazine, 2002/10/31)
An interview with Christopher Hitchens, who's latest book is "Why Orwell Matters": "The idea that something like Afghanistan is the ideal society - I know what I think about that. If it involves smashing planes full of people into buildings full of people, I'm against that too. How tough is that? More surprising I think are the people who would evade that question, or try to change the subject. But I think Orwell was a help in guessing the motive of that kind of masochism, that kind of self-hatred. ... They'll be patriotic about others, or they'll make excuses about others they wouldn't make for themselves. It's a sort of psychological displacement, if you will. There was and there still is a sickening amount of that on what you could call the American left and, of course, never forget, on the American right. ... The fallacy is one of moral equivalence. The motive for it, or the ruse of it, is - I prefer to call it masochistic. It's a self-hatred. ... You see the bad faith of this all the way through. It culminates in the most fatuous slogan yet devised, which is: "Stop the war before it starts." Which is a protest against removing either al-Qaida from Afghanistan or the Taliban from Afghanistan or both. Well, at this point it has to be said I think that the left has lost every moral and political element that made it a formidable force as an antiwar movement in the 1960s." (See also: "The Power of Facing" (Elizabeth Wasserman, The Atlantic, 2002/10/23))"Watson lecturer calls for pacifist response to terrorism" (Monique Meneses, The Brown Daily Herald, 2002/10/30)
Moral equivalence aligned with its usual companion - plain stupidity: "University of Rochester Professor Robert Holmes compared President George Bush to Osama bin Laden and argued that pacifism, not aggression, will stop terrorism at his lecture Tuesday afternoon at the Watson Institute for International Studies. ... "Once you strip away the patriotism and the nationalism, you are left with George Bush on one hand and Osama bin Laden on the other hand," Holmes said. He said he found similarities in Bush's and bin Laden's beliefs. "I see both convinced that he has the absolute truth with a capital 'T,' each willing to kill for the truth and each believing he has major backing from the strongest religion in the world," he said. ... He proposed a pacifist alternative to the war on terrorism by opening discussion and debate on issues of conflict, helping put Afghanistan on it feet, calling off the "dogs" of war against Iraq and talking with the very people who we are designating as the enemy.""Preaching Politics" (Jason L. Steorts, The Harvard Crimson, 2002/10/28)
"You learn a lot from the Bible. There are, first, the moral teachings: Love your neighbor, obey the Ten Commandments and so on. There are answers to the Big Questions: God exists; we are immortal; the choices we make now determine the way we spend eternity. And then there is the injunction to oppose President Bush's Iraq policy. Just ask the Rev. Peter J. Gomes, Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, who recently gave a sermon - or, rather, a political lecture masquerading as a sermon - on this topic. ... After quoting a verse from Jeremiah in which the Lord delights in "love, justice, and righteousness" Gomes goes on to assume without argument that a war in Iraq would run contrary to these values - as though he has found, along with the case of Nazi Germany, an obvious tension between commitment to God and commitment to country. That conclusion does not follow in any straightforward way from the Scripture Gomes cites, and to lump Nazism and the Bush administration together as didactic examples would be risible if it weren't so offensive." (See also: "Sermon: Patriotism is Not Enough" (Rev. Peter J. Gomes, The Memorial Church, 2002/10/06): "Since we are not Nazi Germany, and because we do claim love, justice, and righteousness not only as personal values but as national values, we have all the more responsibility to make the country we love a lovely country. ... Don't allow yourself to be overpowered with evil: take the offensive and overpower evil with good. That is what Paul is saying: Take the offensive: overpower evil with good! Now that is a radical foreign policy.")"12 Americans Stage Protest Hussein Is Happy to Allow" (John F. Burns, The New York Times, 2002/10/27)
A group of 12 Americans from a Chicago-based pacifist group, Voices in the Wilderness, gathered today to bring the American style of protest to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. ... Kathy Kelly, a 49-year-old former Chicago high school English teacher who is a co-founder of Voices in the Wilderness, spoke out against the Bush administration and in defense of positions taken by Mr. Hussein. At one point, she said she wished that the United States government would follow Mr. Hussein's example in ordering the emptying of Iraq's prisons, a move the Iraqi leader made last Sunday, in part to counter Mr. Bush's descriptions of him as a murdering tyrant. "I wish people in our country would be willing to show the same spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation to the two million people in our prisons," she said.""US peace marches draw thousands" (BBC News, 2002/10/26)
Moral equivalence à la Sarandon: "More than 10,000 people have marched on the White House in Washington, as part of a day of worldwide protests against a possible American-led war against Iraq. The organisers of the Washington march had been expecting many thousands more to attend. However, a BBC correspondent in Washington says the rally is still the biggest demonstration against an Iraqi war so far. ... The rally in Washington opened with speeches at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Speakers included musician Patti Smith and actress Susan Sarandon. "Let us find a way to resist fundamentalism - fundamentalism of all kinds, within al-Qaeda and within our government," Ms Sarandon said. Among those also taking part were civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, and Palestinian and Moslem groups." (See also: "Anti-War Activists Rally in Washington" (Lawrence L. Knutson, AP/The Washington Post, 2002/10/26): "Thousands of people protested in northern Europe, but the turnouts were far below organizers' predictions. In Germany, a crowd estimated by police at 4,500 people carried placards that declared "War on the imperialist war," "Stop Bush's campaign" and "No blood for oil," along with a few Iraqi flags, at Berlin's downtown Alexanderplatz ahead of a planned march past the U.S. and British embassies.")"The Power of Facing" (Elizabeth Wasserman, The Atlantic, 2002/10/23)
An interview with Christopher Hitchens on his latest book "Why Orwell Matters": "You write a lot about the intense bitterness that the left still harbors toward Orwell. I wonder whether you think this is something typical - leftist intellectuals today are often accused of intolerance of criticism, especially from within, and of intellectual bullying and censorship in the name of political correctness. Do you see their Orwell-bashing as a manifestation of that, or as something more profound?
I think you're right - it's an aspect of that. I think Hannah Arendt said that one of the great achievements of Stalinism was to replace all discussion involving arguments and evidence with the question of motive. If someone were to say, for example, that there are many people in the Soviet Union who don't have enough to eat, it might make sense for them to respond, "It's not our fault, it was the weather, a bad harvest or something." Instead it's always, "Why is this person saying this, and why are they saying it in such and such a magazine? It must be that this is part of a plan." Some of that mentality is involved, certainly, in the way the old left people like Raymond Williams write about Orwell. They never lose that habit of thought. Political correctness, by the way, is a very mild form of this. I mean, people who talk about political correctness as being a kind of thought police have no idea of what a thought police is. But political correctness does have the same mentality. It means that intellectual argument is doomed. Objective truth simply becomes a thing to jeer at, because obviously there's no such thing as objectivity - unless of course you're politically okay, in which case you can be objective. Any child can see through that, but many adults can't.""Choking in the stink of our own self-hatred" (Howard Jacobson, Independent, 2002/10/19)
"If we are the responsibility of those who beget us, then they must be our responsibility in turn. The past flows through us as certainly as the future. A genetic no less than a theological truth. But that's not the same as taking blame when there is no blame to be taken. An obscene act of arrogation, I now realise, making one's culpability the heart of everything. Unjust to one's immortal soul, which wants no part of it. And unjust even to the Nazis and their like, who must be allowed to sin egregiously on their own behalf and go to hell unmolested. Ditto those who blew apart the however many hundreds of kids dancing the last of their lives away in Bali. It behoves us to stay out of their motives. Utterly obscene, the narrative of guilty causation which now waits on every fresh atrocity – "What else are the dissatisfied to do but kill?" etc – as though dissatisfaction were an automatic detonator, as though Cain were the creation of Abel's will. Obscene in its haste. Obscene in its self-righteousness, mentally permitting others to pay the price of our self-loathing. Obscene in its ignorance – for we should know now how Selbsthass operates, encouraging those who hate us only to hate us more, since we concur in their conviction of our detestableness. Here is our decadence: not the nightclubs, not the beaches and the sex and the drugs, but our incapacity to believe we have been wronged. Our lack of self-worth.""Bleeding hearts left exposed as fools" (Gerard Henderson, The Sydney Morning Herald, 2002/10/14)
"Perhaps those who blamed the US for September 11 will now realise they have been deluded. Who will be on Michael Leunig's Christmas card list this time? Last year, in the aftermath of the terrorist murders in the United States, the Melbourne-based cartoonist declared that it was time to extend "mercy, forgiveness, compassion" to, wait for it, the leader of al-Qaeda. Writing in The Age on Christmas Eve, the intellectual guru of Down Under's leftist luvvies declared: "Might we, can we, find a place in our heart for the humanity of Osama bin Laden and those others? On Christmas Day, can we consider their suffering, their children and the possibility that they too have their goodness? It is a family day, and Osama is our relative." It remains to be seen whether Leunig will exhibit similar sentiments this Christmas with respect to the weekend's massacre of the innocents. ... Then there are the asinine utterances of the infantile left. Remember the claim by Bob Ellis that there are many kinds of terrorism - including "a creditor's threatening letter" (The Canberra Times, January 14, 2002)? And Richard Neville's assertion in Amerika Psycho (Ocean Press, 2002) that US policy after September 11 can be explained in terms of Bush's aim to "extend America's grip on the wealth of the world". ... Whatever personal positions are held about Bush, Blair and John Howard, contemporary terrorism amounts to an attack on Western civilisation. The sooner this is understood, the sooner the likes of Leunig will recognise that bin Laden is one of those brothers who, if given the chance, commits fratricide; before, during or after Christmas.""Left Behind" (Jonathan V. Last, The Weekly Standard, 2002/10/11)
Last on yesterday's "Prominent Citizens Oppose War with Iraq" press conference: "The religious left, in the person of Linda Fuller, of Habitat for Humanity, asked, "Can you imagine the difference if we voted, as a nation, to pray for Osama bin Laden?" Fuller then recounted a story about her son. Evidently, when he was a young boy there was another kid in the neighborhood who always bullied him. Confronted with what to do about this bully, Fuller convinced her son to invite him to his birthday party. The bully came to the party, and afterwards, the two were fast friends. Paul Wolfowitz, take note. ... The most memorable thing about the presentation of NOW's Olga Vivas was Vivas's job title. She's the "Action Vice President" at the National Organization for Women. (Is that like an action figure? Does she come with kung-fu grip? Shouldn't Dick Cheney demand the same title?) But she did have the best red meat of the day, saying that it isn't radical Islam, but rather "U.S. foreign policy" that "has already contributed to" the "oppression" of women in the Middle East. Besides, she asked, "Isn't there terror being inflicted on the women and children of the United States" by Bush's domestic policy?""Why Israel and not Sudan, is singled out" (Charles Jacobs, The Boston Globe, 2002/10/05)
"An instructive case is Sudan. Atrocities there exceed every other world horror. For 10 years the blacks of South Sudan have been victims of an onslaught that has taken more than 2 million lives. ... Western lack of interest is all the more stunning as Khartoum's onslaught has rekindled the trade in black slaves, halted (mostly) a century ago by the British abolitionists. Arab militias storm African villages, kill the men, and enslave the women and children. Accounts by journalists and others depict the horror. In these pogroms, after the men are slaughtered, the women, girls, and boys are gang raped - or they have their throats slit for resisting. The terrorized survivors are marched northward and distributed to Arab masters, the women to become concubines, the girls domestics, the boys goat herders. ... How can it be that there is no storm of indignation at Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, which, though they rushed to Jenin to investigate false reports of Jews massacring Arabs, care so much less about Arab-occupied Juba, South Sudan's black capital? ... This selectivity, at least in the United States, does not come from the hatred of Jews. It is ''a human rights complex'' - and is not hard to understand. The human rights community, composed mostly of compassionate white people, feels a special duty to protest evil done by those who are like ''us.'' ... The biggest victims of this complex are not the Jews who are obsessively criticized but the victims of genocide, enslavement, religious persecution, and ethnic cleansing who are murderously ignored: the Christian slaves of Sudan, the Muslim slaves of Mauritania, the Tibetans, the Kurds, the Christians in Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt.""Stupidity Watch" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/10/02)
"'Many more people die from hunger than in Sept. 11,' says Charlotte Bunch, head of Rutgers University's Center for Women's Global Leadership and a contributor to The Nation. A report in the Daily Targum, a student newspaper, adds: 'Sept. 11 has, in many ways, had a negative impact on women's rights. Although removal of the Taliban has furthered women's rights to some degree, Bunch said, she fears a backlash from the Taliban that would further restrict women's rights.'" (See also: "Speaker blasts U.S. war policy" (Tanya Pastor, The Daily Targum, 2002/10/02))"Susan Sontag Award" (andrewsullivan.com, 2002/10/02)
Sullivan quotes Edward Said, "once again comparing Israelis to Nazis": "But it is certainly true that one universal truth about the Holocaust is not only that it should never again happen to Jews, but that as a cruel and tragic collective punishment, it should not happen to any people at all. ... Quite apart from his actual history of mistakes and misrule, Yasser Arafat is now being made to feel like a hunted Jew by the state of the Jews. There is no gainsaying the fact that the greatest irony of his siege by the Israeli army in his ruined Ramallah compound, is that his ordeal has been planned and carried out by a psychopathic leader who claims to represent the Jewish people. I do not want to press the analogy too far, but it is true to say that Palestinians under Israeli occupation today are as powerless as Jews were in the 1940s." (See also: "Low point of powerlessness" (Edward Said, Al-Ahram Weekly, from the 26 Sept. - 2 October 2002 issue))"Saddam's Patsies" (George F. Will, New York Post, 2002/10/01)
"Not since Jane Fonda posed for photographers at a Hanoi anti-aircraft gun has there been anything like Rep. Jim McDermott, speaking to ABC's "This Week" from Baghdad, saying Americans should take Saddam Hussein at his word, but should not take President Bush at his. ... McDermott sided with Saddam in opposing what McDermott calls the "coercive stuff" - inspections backed by force, which are the only kind that have even a remote chance of being productive. Parroting Saddam's line to perfection, he said "Iraq did not drive the inspectors out, we" - actually, the U.N. - "took them out. So they should be given a chance." His implication is that America, not Iraq, foiled inspections. ...
Bonior's contribution from Baghdad was to charge that "a horrendous, barbaric, horrific" number of cases of childhood leukemia and lymphomas have been caused by "uranium that has been part of our weapons system that was dropped here during the last war." ... The radiation involved is much less than that occurring naturally in the Iraqi soil where tank battles occurred in 1991. At least a dozen U.S., U.N. and European studies, including one involving U.S. soldiers who still have depleted uranium in their bodies resulting from "friendly fire" accidents, show no grounds for believing in the health effects Baghdad and Bonior claim." (See also: "Democratic Congressman Asserts Bush Would Mislead U.S. on Iraq" (John H. Cushman Jr., The New York Times, 2002/09/30))"You've Lost Your Way, Baby" (Catherine Seipp, Reason, from the October 2002 issue)
Seipp on how "organized feminism has made itself irrelevant": "The Feminist Majority Foundation has also been stuck in a bog of moral equivalency over the war on terrorism. In December its Web site, www.feminist.org, touted an online chat with its founder and president, Eleanor Smeal, "connecting U.S. and International Terrorism." The connection Smeal sees concerns not extremist American mullahs indoctrinating terrorists intent on murdering thousands but (and she's not kidding) anti-abortion protesters. ... Another lesson to be learned from organized feminism's reaction to 9/11 is that no tragedy is too great, no issue too important, not to be reduced to the most simple-minded identity politics. Those 343 firemen who sacrificed themselves at the Twin Towers? NOW is upset that there were no women among them. ... One of the minor casualties of 9/11 was patience for listening to privileged Americans complain, in distinctly anti-American terms, about their privileged American lives. If feminism doesn't want to completely wear out women's patience - and men's, too - it had better find a new agenda. Perhaps one that is, to start with, less blatantly foolish, and more engaged with the issues that women regularly tell pollsters they care most about: crime, the economy, child care, balancing work and motherhood, their children's schools.""Protesters turn to thoughts of Iraq" (Kevin Anderson, BBC News, 2002/09/30)
Moral equivalence in yesterdays anti-war march in Washington: "Anti-war messages had been part of the weekend's protests, centred around the World Bank and IMF meetings in Washington. But this was the only demonstration focussed solely on war in Iraq. ... Paul Rubenson and Trish Bright carried a sign saying "Al Qaeda had a first strike policy too". ... Mr Rubenson added: 'We talk about how we believe in the rule of law and democracy and how we believe in peace and justice, and yet, we're doing exactly the same things that we accuse our enemies of doing.'""Democratic Congressman Asserts Bush Would Mislead U.S. on Iraq" (John H. Cushman Jr., The New York Times, 2002/09/30)
"Democratic congressmen who are visiting Iraq this week stirred up anger among some Republicans when they questioned the reasons President Bush has used to justify possible military action against Iraq. ... Speaking of the administration, Mr. McDermott said, "I believe that sometimes they give out misinformation." ... When pressed for evidence about whether President Bush had lied, Mr. McDermott said, "I think the president would mislead the American people." But he said he believed that inspections of Iraq's weapons programs could be worked out. ... Mr. Bonior, the second-ranking Democrat in the House, said: 'We've got to move forward in a way that's fair and impartial. That means not having the United States or the Iraqis dictate the rules to these inspections.'" (See also: "Congress Sharply Divided on Iraq" (Laura Meckler, AP/Yahoo! News, 2002/09/29) and "Whose side are they one?" (Andrew Sullivan, andrewsullivan.com, 2002/09/30): "So at a crucial juncture in American diplomacy, this Democrat is saying that Bush is a liar and a cheat - and in Baghdad! The only word for this is vile. ... This guy is saying that we should be neutral between the demands of the United States and Iraq over weapons inspections. Neutral. Between his own country and a vicious military despot with weapons of mass destruction, Bonior cautions neutrality." UPDATE: shilobucher.com has a transcript of the interview: "Live from Iraq" (shilobucher.com, 2002/09/30))"Left Behind" (George Packer, The New York Times Magazine, 2002/09/22)
An in-depth profile of the radical lawyer Lynne Stewart, who represented Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and now face charges of aiding a terrorist organization:
"When the towers fell, she felt that her city had been violated and her own life disrupted (her office is below Canal Street). But this warmhearted woman took the slaughter of innocents with a certain coldbloodedness. The U.S. is constantly at war around the world and shouldn't expect its acts to go unanswered, she says. The Pentagon was ''a better target''; the people in the towers ''never knew what hit them. They had no idea that they could ever be a target for somebody's wrath, just by virtue of being American. They took it personally. And actually, it wasn't a personal thing.'' As for civilian deaths in general: ''I'm pretty inured to the notion that in a war or in an armed struggle, people die. They're in the wrong place, they're in a nightclub in Israel, they're at a stock market in London, they're in the Algerian outback - whatever it is, people die.'' She mentions Hiroshima and Dresden. 'So I have a lot of trouble figuring out why that is wrong, especially when people are sort of placed in a position of having no other way.'''"Marching off to peace" (Ken Loach, The Observer, 2002/09/22)
Ken Loach is "ahead of this week's anti-war demonstration". He seems to be unable to draw a distinction between dictatorships and democracies: "An authoritative witness, Scott Ritter, the man who spent seven years as a UN arms inspector in Iraq, says: 'Since 1998, Iraq has been fundamentally disarmed.' Where is the substantial evidence to counter that? If such weapons are the issue, then Israel should be first in the dock, since it possesses far more than any regime in the area. Indeed, if all are equal before the law, should not the UN send inspectors to all countries with these weapons? ... Respect for international law and UN resolutions cannot be the issue either. Israel defies the UN without suffering any sanctions. In 1986, the US was found guilty by the International Court of Justice of illegally mining Nicaragua's harbours and fined $370 million. The US ignored the court and its decision. ... The US forfeited any claim to moral leadership long ago. It has a history of undermining international law, contempt for the human rights of others and promoting its own brand of international terrorism.""The Fog of Peace" (David Brooks, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/09/30 issue)
A must-read article about the parochialism of the anti-war left: "For example, on September 19, a group of peaceniks took out a full-page ad in the New York Times opposing the campaign in Afghanistan and a possible campaign in Iraq. ... In the text of the ad, which runs to 15 paragraphs, Saddam Hussein is not mentioned. Weapons of mass destruction are not mentioned. The risks posed by terrorists and terror organizations are not mentioned. ... Reviewing Noam Chomsky, legal scholar Richard Falk, a member of the editorial board of the Nation, observes that while he agrees with much of what Chomsky writes, he is troubled by the fact that Chomsky is "so preoccupied with the evils of U.S. imperialism that it completely occupies all the political and moral space." That is exactly what you see in the writings of the peace camp generally - not only in Chomsky's work but also in the writings of people who are actually tethered to reality. Their supposed demons - Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Donald Rumsfeld, and company - occupy their entire field of vision, so that there is no room for analysis of anything beyond, such as what is happening in the world. ... This is the dictionary definition of parochialism - the inability to consider the larger global threats because one is consumed by one's immediate domestic hatreds. This parochialism takes many forms, but all the branches of the opposition to the war in Iraq have one thing in common: Iraq is never the issue. Something else is always the issue." (See also: "Mixed Nuts" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/09/20))"Pacifism is disguised timidity" (Elizabeth Nickson, National Post, 2002/09/20)
"The source of this wrong thinking was outlined almost 40 years ago by Malcom Muggeridge in the benchmark essay of our time called "The Decade of The Great Liberal Death Wish." Muggeridge, a columnist for The Guardian, was sent to Moscow in the 30s, to report on Stalin, joining all his fellow lefties who believed that under the Great Stalin, a new dawn was breaking in which the human race would at last be united in liberty, equality and fraternity ever more. Stalin, reported Muggeridge, would literally rub his hands together and laugh. The liberal mind, says Muggeridge, is intrinsically susceptible to grovel before any Beelzebub who claims, however implausibly to be a prince of liberals. ... We hate ourselves and we want to die. Little other explanation for not rethinking immigration, for warbling about human rights for prisoners whose stated wish is to kill us, and refusing to defend the women ritually beaten and killed in the Arab world every day. For passively allowing men like Saddam Hussein, whose stated aim is to acquire nuclear weapons to use against us, to stay in power. For not signing up to the most important cause of today. The army is for peacekeeping. Saddam is misunderstood. We give welfare cheques to terrorists, and teach them to fly planes. We want our civilization to die." (See also Muggeridge's lecture: "The Great Liberal Death Wish" (Malcolm Muggeridge, Imprimis/Liberty Haven, from the May 1979 issue): "The thing that impressed me, and the thing that touched off my awareness of the great liberal death wish, my sense that western man was, as it were, sleep-walking into his own ruin, was the extraordinary performance of the liberal intelligentsia, who, in those days, flocked to Moscow like pilgrims to Mecca. And they were one and all utterly delighted and excited by what they saw there. Clergymen walked serenely and happily through the anti-god museums, politicians claimed that no system of society could possibly be more equitable and just, lawyers admired Soviet justice, and economists praised the Soviet economy. They all wrote articles in this sense which we resident journalists knew were completely nonsensical.")"U.S. Slams German Minister for Bush-Hitler Comment" (Reuters, 2002/09/19)
Germany IV: "President Bush's spokesman on Thursday expressed outrage that Germany's justice minister drew a link between Bush's saber-rattling on Iraq to the tactics used by Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. Spokesman Ari Fleischer said the United States and Germany have long had a strong relationship, "but this statement by the justice minister is outrageous and is inexplicable." The regional Schwaebisches Tagblatt newspaper quoted German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's justice minister, Herta Daeubler-Gmelin, as saying 'Bush wants to divert attention from his domestic problems. It's a classic tactic. It's one that Hitler used.'""Activists prepare anti-war campaign" (Brian Wheeler, BBC News, 2002/09/18)
And they call Bush simpleminded?: "Speaking at a Stop the War Coalition rally in East London, veteran left-wing journalist Paul Foot told activists they genuinely had the power to stop a conflict. He said public opinion was with the anti-war movement and the "utter madmen" in George Bush's administration had already bowed to pressure by going to the United Nations. ... "Those madmen that are in charge can be stopped," he added. ... He dismissed talk of Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction as "piffle". "If you close your eyes when they are talking about Iraq and replace it with Israel then everything they say applies. The weapons of mass destruction are there in the Middle East, they are in the hands of the Israeli government, the most dangerous hands they could possibly be in." To rapturous applause, Mr Foot told activists: 'Whatever the UN says, we are against war with Iraq.'""The Indymedia Kids" (Glenn Reynolds, InstaPundit, 2002/09/14)
"The Indymedia Kids are obviously provocateurs working for Ashcroft. Who else would respond to a reference on the Wall Street Journal's website bringing in a lot of new eyeballs by posting this?: "As far as defacing patriotic bumper stickers go, I'm all for it. Patriotism is a disease of the ignorant, kind of like believing in UFOs and palm reading. The American flag is also comparable to the Nazi flag and many people around the planet would agree with this comparison. All empires fall. Let's take down the American one." Oh, right: idiots. So which is it?" (See also:"Bump of Truth Action - Comments" (sf.indymedia.org, 2002/09/13) and "Stupidity Watch" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/09/12))
"The Roots of European Appeasement" (David Gelernter, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/09/23 issue)
An excellent essay: "Once upon a time we thought of appeasement as a particular approach to Hitler. We have long since come to see that it is a Weltanschauung, an entire philosophical worldview that teaches the blood-guilt of Western man, the moral bankruptcy of the West, and the outrageousness of Western civilization's attempting to impose its values on anyone else. World War II and its aftermath clouded the issue, but self-hatred has long since reestablished itself as a dominant force in Europe and (less often and not yet decisively) the United States. ... So modern Europe's visceral loathing of war is a consequence of World War I. Self-determination, anti-colonialism, and the rights of small nations are Wilsonian ideals that took hold in the 1920s. The idea of Western civilization's blood-guilt established itself in the aftermath of the peace of Versailles, bore fruit in 1930s appeasement, and still flourishes today.""Don't Expect Anything Else" (Charles Johnson, Little Green Footballs, 2002/09/13)
"Here's a glimpse into the dank sewer-mind of "social activist" Jaggi Singh, in which he says the anti-Israel thugs at Concordia University had no choice but to riot. "Free speech, expression and debate are crucial values in a society presumed to be democratic, but it wasn't the protesters who were attacking those values on Monday; rather, it was the organizers of Mr. Netanyahu's event at Concordia, as well as the university administration, that gave the event a go-ahead." Got that? Smashing windows and spitting insults at 70-year old Holocaust survivors are not attacks on free speech, but inviting a former Israeli Prime Minister to talk at the University is." (See also: "Day of broken glass" (Jaggi Singh, The Globe and Mail, 2002/09/13), "Netanyahu is the victim" (Jonathan Kay, National Post, 2002/09/10) and "Violent protests force cancellation of Netanyahu speech" (AP/Haaretz, 2002/09/09))
"The Great Refutation" (George F. Will, The Washington Post, 2002/09/11)
"Ideas have consequences - indeed, only ideas have large and lasting consequences - so history is, at bottom, the history of mind. The acts of war a year ago made up our nation's mind, as one restores order to an unmade bed. We made up our mind to fight, of course, but also to become virtuously intolerant of a certain kind of nonsense, including the notion that tolerance is everything because everything else is nothing - nothing but opinion or chimera. The postmodern plague of quotation marks - the punctuation of disparagement that labels as superstitions "virtue" and "heroism" and most of the other things that make life worth living - was erased by men running into burning buildings, men who had not been disabled by today's higher learning. The quotation marks remaining after the Great Refutation surround two words: 'Let's roll!'""Lock them up first: how liberalism begets fascism" (Theodore Dalrymple, The Daily Telegraph, 2002/09/10)
"When chaos threatens, said Goethe, men seek order rather than justice. Then the man on the white horse appears ... This is a process that has already begun in Europe. In France, they have passed a law according to which disorderly children as young as 10 may be subjected to residential detention in special establishments. ... The pendulum has swung from impunity to Draconianism without passing through due process. Only a society that is nearly at the end of its tether, and is so morally corrupted that it is terrified of its own children, could contemplate, let alone enact, such desperate measures. Thus the end product of laxity will not be Sodom and Gomorrah: it will be Sparta. ... But we live in a looking-glass age, where much is the mirror image of what it should be. Liberals (in the American sense) have long established their virtue in the eyes of fellow liberals by playing the game of more-lenient-than-thou. ... It has been far more important to them to preserve their reputation for broadmindedness than to preserve civilisation from the disintegration that always threatens it from within. ... Those liberals who so insouciantly attacked previously existing standards as repressive, and who believe that they were fighting for freedom, were actually preparing the path for fascism.""Real Battles and Empty Metaphors" (Susan Sontag, The New York Times, 2002/09/10)
To call democracy good and Islamist terrorism evil is "jihad language", according to Sontag: "Real wars are not metaphors. And real wars have a beginning and an end. Even the horrendous, intractable conflict between Israel and Palestine will end one day. But this antiterror war can never end. That is one sign that it is not a war but, rather, a mandate for expanding the use of American power. ... When the government declares war on terrorism - terrorism being a multinational, largely clandestine network of enemies - it means that the government is giving itself permission to do what it wants. ... Those who objected to the jihad language used by the American government (good versus evil, civilization versus barbarism) were accused of condoning the attacks, or at least the legitimacy of the grievances behind the attacks." (See also: "First Reactions" (Susan Sontag, The New Yorker, 2001/09/17))"Tribute to the towers" (Linda Herrick, The New Zeeland Herald, 2002/09/09)
Stupidity watch in extreme. Found via InstaPundit: "In all my years as an arts writer I've heard some outrageous statements, but Gail Haffern's take on September 11 is, shall we say, singular. Auckland-based Haffern, the first person in New Zealand to gain a doctorate in fine arts and a doctorate programme teacher at Elam Art School, sees the day's events and those planes-into-towers images as "wonderful ... because it was a new idea". Well, it's certainly never been done before but Haffern claims she's not alone in her opinion. "Since September 11, I've been asking people how that day was for them - almost inevitably I get the answer that in the end, it was wonderful." ... "What I found, when I went into work the day after, everyone was accusing somebody, everyone had something bad to say about somebody else, whether it was Bush or Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda or whatever - someone was in the wrong and I found that position quite hard to handle." ... "My doctorate dealt with people in the wrong and I came to the conclusion there is not right or wrong, no evil, no good," she says. ... 'I'm saying, step away from blame. How are we to act if we act only according to blame? So many of us just think and squeal, think and squeal. This act is done and you can't fault the execution of the act. It was perfect, extraordinarily clever.'"
"Mugabe's final solution" (Paul Craig Roberts, The Washington Times, 2002/09/09)
"Noel Ignatiev, Harvard academic and founder of the racist magazine, Race Traitor, wants "to abolish the white race." ... It is not surprising that Mr. Ignatiev has been influenced by education that demonizes Western civilization and white people. Neither is it surprising that education led him to the conclusion that the solution is to phase white people out of the human race. ... The real question is: who hates the "white race" most? The answer is: alienated white intellectuals. The multicultural diversity-mongers in college and university faculties are disproportionately white. They have been trying for decades to make blacks hate whites as much as they do. These intellectuals have had some success. They have cultivated black anger by making accusations against whites, and they have planted guilt and doubt in many of the younger generation of white Americans. A make-believe history is slowly taking over the American mind, just like Karl Marx's make-believe history took over Russia and Adolf Hitler's make-believe history took over Germany. The cultivation of race hatred in blacks and race guilt in whites is an ongoing enterprise in American education. Before it is over, there will be more Noel Ignatievs.""Church leaders speak against 'wicked' war" (Ruth Gledhill and Phillip Webster, The Times, 2002/09/05)
The Archbishop of Westminster urges "generous self-sacrifice" as an alternative to an attack on Iraq: "In an article in The Times today the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, writes that a war would have grave consequences, possibly setting the Arab world against the West. ... Dr Eamon Duffy, Fellow and President of Magdalen College, Oxford, and president of the Catholic Theological Association, urged Mr Blair and President Bush to take heed of the Cardinal’s comments, which he described as a shrewd counsel of prudence and an urgent call to moraliy. 'If the democratic West is to retain moral credibility and if we are to avoid a murderous confrontation with an Islamic world radicalised by poverty and resentment of Western imperialism, then we have to move beyond defending our interests and punishing our enemies. We need to demonstrate our desire to share the freedoms and prosperities we enjoy with the world's poor.'" (See also: "The standards by which war with Iraq must be judged" (Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, The Times, 2002/09/05): "By pouring almost inconceivably massive resources into preparing for, and then prosecuting, military conflict, we inevitably divert funds from the war on world poverty. By so doing, we further endanger the fragile lives of millions of people, over and above those who become victims of conflict itself. ... I am convinced that the might of generous self-sacrifice, rather than the might of arms, is the only way to construct a more just and more peaceful world.")
"Powell Jeered" (Andrew Sullivan, andrewsullivan.com, 2002/09/04)
"What does it say about the anti-globalization left that it began its heckling of Colin Powell today when he criticized the insane, dictatorial, racist and famine-producing policies of Robert Mugabe? Yes, Mugabe in their eyes is morally superior to the secretary of state of the United States. And we expect them to worry about Saddam?" (See also: "Powell Booed and Jeered at Global Environment Meeting" (Rachel L. Swarns and Terence Neilan, The New York Times, 2002/09/04): "Delegates from American and Australian environmental groups repeatedly interrupted him, shouting "Shame on Bush!" Some held up banners reading, "Betrayed by governments" and "Bush: People and Planet, Not Big Business." ... The heckling started when Secretary Powell criticized Zimbabwe for pursuing land reform policies that have pushed "millions of people to the brink of starvation.")
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