Here’s Judea Pearl, UCLA professor of computer science and father of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, on “the normalization of evil”:
Somehow, barbarism, often cloaked in the language of “resistance,” has gained acceptance in the most elite circles of our society. The words “war on terror” cannot be uttered today without fear of offense. Civilized society, so it seems, is so numbed by violence that it has lost its gift to be disgusted by evil.I believe it all started with well-meaning analysts, who in their zeal to find creative solutions to terror decided that terror is not a real enemy, but a tactic. Thus the basic engine that propels acts of terrorism—the ideological license to elevate one’s grievances above the norms of civilized society—was wished away in favor of seemingly more manageable “tactical” considerations. . . .The clearest endorsement of terror as a legitimate instrument of political bargaining came from former President Jimmy Carter. In his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” Mr. Carter appeals to the sponsors of suicide bombing. “It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Road-map for Peace are accepted by Israel.” Acts of terror, according to Mr. Carter, are no longer taboo, but effective tools for terrorists to address perceived injustices. . . .When we ask ourselves what it is about the American psyche that enables genocidal organizations like Hamas—the charter of which would offend every neuron in our brains—to become tolerated in public discourse, we should take a hard look at our universities and the way they are currently being manipulated by terrorist sympathizers.
Why does evil only apply to what other people do? I think you do better than many at pointing out evil on ‘your’ side, but its just so hard to find an ‘analysis’ like this that doesn’t seem to carry hypocrisy at its heart.
The fact is that war is evil. Regardless of tactics. It is totally and entirely evil, and we do not do nearly enough to prevent and avoid it. What do we expect, that Al Qaeda will march in formation and meet us on a battlefield somewhere? We do all we can to demoralize and destroy them, and they do the same to us. Our warfare isn’t somehow cleaner – our targets are just as dead, and the majority of them are always civilians.
Of course terrorism is evil – but pretending it isn’t also a tactic, that it is somehow so distant from our own evil, is just unsustainable.
I’m still waiting for a clean war to compare to terrorism.
“War is evil” is not a fact, it’s an opinion. It is of course an opinion for which you can make a strong case, but it is nevertheless still an opinion. Similarly, I could say, “The fact is that war is sometimes necessary to defeat evil,” and that too would be not fact but opinion–though again, an opinion for which there is a strong case to be made.
I could also say, “The fact is that declaring war ‘totally and entirely evil . . . regardless of tactics’ creates a false moral equivalence that blinds you to the deep moral difference between doing everything possible to avoid killing civilians in war (even if it means letting combatants escape), on the one hand, and deliberately targeting and butchering civilians, on the other.” That, too, would in truth be not a proven fact but an expressed opinion; again, though, it would be one I could defend.
It certainly is a fact that there has never been a perfectly clean war, and it seems reasonable to expect that there never will be; but that doesn’t mean there is no difference between how various nations wage war. It doesn’t mean that there is no moral difference between, let’s say, Israel resisting invasion from Egypt and Syria in the Yom Kippur War, on the one hand, and the firebombing of Dresden in WW II, on the other. When you say “regardless of tactics,” what you’re essentially saying is, there’s no difference between trying to reduce civilian casualties in war and just going for total war . . . and the more people believe that, the worse wars will be when they happen, because there will be fewer people around to argue against simply waging total war.
I certainly don’t believe in glorifying war; I certainly agree that many terrible things happen in war. But I think when you ask, in response to this article, “why does evil only apply to what other people do,” it supports the argument that you have a certain degree of tone-deafness in this area. Everyone does evil, yes; but there remains a real difference between civilization and barbarism, between societies which try (though imperfectly) to mitigate and reduce evil and those which, as a matter of ideology, policy, or convenience, embrace it.
Put another way, I understand and respect you condemning the Bush administration for such things as permitting waterboarding in three or four instances; but I think it’s inconsistent of you to do so and then turn around and complain when someone like Dr. Pearl calls for the condemnation of Hamas, which does far worse things–and does them as a matter of routine. I recognize that many of those who decried the Bush administration did so not out of any real moral principle, but merely because it served their political purposes (as can be seen in the fact, for instance, that some of those in the Senate who criticized his administration’s policies most strongly in public voted to support those policies time and again when the MSM wasn’t watching). For those who truly are acting on principle, however, you should be just as eager to condemn Hamas as you were to condemn the Bush administration, and to do so in the far stronger terms that their malignant actions merit.
The truth is, no, we do not “do all we can to demoralize and destroy them”; there were many tactics which the Bush administration eschewed. The truth also is that when you say, “our targets are just as dead, and the majority of them are always civilians,” you miss the fact that as a rule, we don’t target civilians. The other side does. That’s a major distinction. Do we perfectly prevent civilian casualties? No, certainly not. Do we try? Yes. Does Hamas or al’Qaeda? No, they deliberately create them for purposes of policy. That’s a major, major difference–and I have no hesitation in saying that it makes their movement evil. I have no hesitation in saying that it makes their movement barbaric, and that it degrades those who serve it into barbarians.