perfidy

Another post long delayed is an update to my post on the laws of civilized warfare. Or as Ken McLeod would have it, “Civilised Warfare.” Shortly after writing my piece, I was cruising around my internet neighborhood, and dropped in on the Maximum Leader. He had posted a link to an editorial by one Sam Harris in the LA Times. Mr. Harris is a liberal, and recently the author of a book that slams religion. All of them. (At least he is even-handed in his contempt. Like the saying goes, you’re not a bigot if you hate everyone.) Normally I avoid reading the LA Times, so I would likely have missed this article if not for the intervention of our Dear Leader.

Now, one would expect that a liberal religion hater would also hold a typical package of left-leaning beliefs. You would be wrong. The whole article is worth reading, and you should be reading Naked Villainy on general principles. But one bit bore directly on my post of last week.

In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world, especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal.

Given these distinctions, there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet liberals in the United States and Europe often speak as though the truth were otherwise.

We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.

This summary is, tragically, far better written than my own. But it again hits the point that unless we are to completely discard any sort of moral viewpoint of human action in the world, we have no choice but to view some people, groups, and actions as inherently better than others. (The alternative is to view the world through a lens of expediency, which is what McLeod seems to suggest, despite his claims of compassion.)

Tolerance, compassion and fairness are virtues. What liberals so often fail to realize is that they are far from the only virtues. When we look out at the world we must make judgments, we must discriminate between the good and the bad. If we lack the courage and confidence to look at someone and say, “That’s wrong” we have no compass for guiding our own actions in the world.