Learning moral clarity from Gaza
A must-read from
Charles Krauthammer.
To deliberately wage war so that your own
people can be telegenically killed is indeed moral and tactical
insanity. But it rests on a very rational premise: Given the Orwellian
state of the world’s treatment of Israel (see: the U.N.’s
grotesque Human Rights Council), fueled by a mix of classic
anti-Semitism, near-total historical ignorance and reflexive sympathy
for the ostensible Third World underdog, these eruptions featuring
Palestinian casualties ultimately undermine support for Israel’s
legitimacy and right to self-defense.
In a world of such Kafkaesque ethical inversions, the depravity of Hamas begins to make sense. This is a world in which the Munich massacre is a movie and the murder of Klinghoffer is an opera — both deeply sympathetic to the killers. This is a world in which the U.N. ignores humanity’s worst war criminals while incessantly condemning Israel,
a state warred upon for 66 years that nonetheless goes to extraordinary
lengths to avoid harming the very innocents its enemies use as shields.
It’s to the Israelis’ credit that amid all this madness they haven’t
lost their moral scruples. Or their nerve. Those outside the region have
the minimum obligation, therefore, to expose the madness and speak the
truth. Rarely has it been so blindingly clear.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Charles Krauthammer, fierce moral urgency, Gaza, Hamas rockets, moral equivalence, moral relativism, morality, Operation Protective Edge
Moral relativism at the Washington Post
I don't know how many of you saw the front page of Monday's Washington Post, but here's some of the
moral relativism that's typical of news coverage of 'Palestinian' terror.
The list of prisoners who may be released in coming days includes
militants who threw firebombs, in one case at a bus carrying children;
stabbed and shot civilians, including women, elderly Jews and suspected
Palestinian collaborators; and ambushed and killed border guards, police
officers, security agents and soldiers. All of them have been in prison
for at least two decades; some were serving life sentences.
The
Israeli public views these prisoners as terrorists who have blood on
their hands. Palestinians see them as freedom fighters struggling to
reclaim their homeland and oust the occupiers. Palestinian Authority
President Mahmoud Abbas and his leadership refused to return to the
negotiating table without their release.
Two equally valid viewpoints, no? I wonder if WaPo would publish a description of the 9/11 hijackers who crashed a plane into the Pentagon as "freedom fighters struggling to spread Islam all over the world." Would they use the morally neutral term 'militants' to describe them?
I suppose maybe they would.
More
here.
Labels: 9/11, moral relativism, Palestinian terrorists, Washington Post
It's shameful! John Kerry's Magical Mystical Moral Equivalence tour
I'm sorry but because I am in mourning, I cannot post the song you all would have expected me to post after seeing that title. But the cartoon is courtesy of the
Jewish Press.
Seth Mandel takes down US Secretary of State John FN Kerry's
shameful moral equivalence.
The armed Turkish invaders Kerry has developed such sympathy for were
on a ship funded by a terrorist organization with ties to Hamas and
other jihadist groups seeking to challenge Israel’s navy in order to
help Hamas. If they were victims at all, it was of their own violent
ideology. Though we don’t know yet what motivated the Tsarnaev brothers
to perpetrate the monstrous bombing they are believed to have carried
out and the additional ones law enforcement officials believe they were
planning, the biographical picture beginning to emerge paints at least
the elder of the two as “increasingly militant” in his Muslim faith.
But whether the Tsarnaevs were inspired by Islamic radicalism at all
is beside the point in the case of Kerry’s comments. The victims in
Boston were victims of a brutal and murderous attack; the “victims” to
whom Kerry compared them were in the act of carrying out their own
attack. Kerry’s comments also put Israelis trying to contain a terrorist
enclave next door on the same moral plane as those terrorists and their
allies.
Perhaps Kerry misspoke. If not, his worldview is warped, dangerous,
and dishonorable. The same administration officials who nudged Netanyahu
to apologize to Erdogan should pay a visit to Kerry. The secretary of
state owes a round of apologies thanks to his inauspicious start as
America’s chief diplomat.
It might have been acceptable to compare the IHH terrorists to the Tsarnaevs since both groups were militant Islamic terrorists. But what Kerry said was much worse. By comparing the Boston Marathon
victims to the IHH terrorists, he essentially compared the Israeli Navy to the Tsarnaevs. He called the Israeli Navy terrorists. That's why people here are furious with him.
And Bostonians should be furious with him for comparing their citizens who were murdered and wounded to a group of terrorists on the high seas. But for some reason, this story doesn't seem to be getting as much play in the US as it is here.
Labels: Boston, Boston Marathon, IHH, Islamic terrorism, Israel Navy, John Kerry, Mavi Marmara, moral equivalence, moral relativism
'While many ... feel strongly about their Zionism, few have the courage to publicly express their opinions'
Caroline Glick explains how
moral relativism is silencing American Jewish supporters of Israel.
It was not a coincidence that the Times failed to mention why
Morsi's castigation of Jews as apes and pigs was so familiar to Muslim
audiences.
The Islamic sources of Muslim
Brotherhood Jew hatred, and indeed, hatred of Jews by Islamic leaders
from both the Sunni and Shi'ite worlds, is largely overlooked by the
liberal ideological camp. And the overwhelming majority of the American
Jewish leadership is associated with the liberal ideological camp.
If
the Times acknowledged that the Jew hatred espoused by Morsi and his
colleagues in the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as by their Shi'ite
colleagues in the Iranian regime and Hezbollah is based on the Koran,
they would have to acknowledge that Islamic Jew hatred and other bigotry
is not necessarily antithetical to mainstream Islamic teaching. And
that is something that the Times, like its fellow liberal institutions,
is not capable of acknowledging.
They are
incapable of acknowledging this possibility because considering it would
implicitly require a critical study of jihadist doctrine. And a
critical study of jihadist doctrine would show that the doctrine of
jihad, or Islamic holy war, subscribed to by the Muslim Brotherhood and
its affiliates, as well as by the Iranian regime and Hezbollah and their
affiliates, is widely supported, violent, bigoted, evil and dangerous
to the free world.
And that isn't even the
biggest problem with studying the doctrine of jihad. The biggest problem
is that a critical study of the doctrine of jihad would force liberal
institutions like the New York Times and the institutional leadership of
the American Jewish community alike to abandon the reigning dogma of
the liberal ideological camp - moral relativism.
Moral
relativism is based on a refusal to call evil evil and a concomitant
willingness to denigrate truth if truth requires you to notice evil.
Since
pointing out the reality of the danger the jihadist doctrines
propagated by the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood involves the implicit
demand that people make distinctions between good and evil and side with
good against evil, moral relativists - that is most liberals - cannot
contend with jihad.
This is why the American
Jewish leadership refused to join Rand Paul and his conservative
Republican colleagues in the Senate and demand an immediate cessation of
US military aid to the Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Egyptian military
even after the evidence of the Brotherhood's genocidal Jew hatred was
splashed across the front page of the Times.
It
is the dominance of moral relativism in liberal institutions like the
New York Times that make even the most apologetic expose of the Muslim
Brotherhood a major event. And it is the dominance of liberal
orthodoxies in the mainstream Jewish community that makes it all but
impossible for Jewish leaders to speak up against the Muslim
Brotherhood, despite the manifest danger its genocidal hatred of Jews
poses not only for Israel, but for Jews everywhere.
It
is bad enough that liberal Jewish leaders won't speak out against the
Koranic-inspired evil that characterizes the ideology of the Muslim
Brotherhood. What is worse is what their own morally relative blindness
causes them to do.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Egypt, jihad, Mohammed Morsy, moral relativism, Muslim Brotherhood, New York Times, Pamela Geller, Yeshiva University
