Tag Archives: moral equivalence

Defeating Islamic Terrorism

Posted on by
Reply

Britain’s Prime Minister, David Cameron, has a thought on the matter.

[A]ny strategy to defeat extremism must confront, head on, the extreme ideology that underpins it. We must take its component parts to pieces – the cultish worldview, the conspiracy theories, and yes, the so-called glamorous parts of it as well.

In doing so, let’s not forget our strongest weapon: our own liberal values. We should expose their extremism for what it is – a belief system that glorifies violence and subjugates its people – not least Muslim people.

We should contrast their bigotry, aggression and theocracy with our values. We have, in our country, a very clear creed and we need to promote it much more confidently.
…
[T]here is also the question of identity.

For all our successes as multi-racial, multi-faith democracy, we have to confront a tragic truth that there are people born and raised in this country who don’t really identify with Britain – and who feel little or no attachment to other people here. Indeed, there is a danger in some of our communities that you can go your whole life and have little to do with people from other faiths and backgrounds.

All of that applies here, too, can this administration—or more likely, its successor in 18 too-long months—find the moral courage actually to apply it.

Structure and Assimilation

Posted on by
Reply

A commenter on a blog I follow talked briefly about this as part of a larger comment. The thrust of the aside concerned the ink spilled arguing about government structure, but that while structure is important, what’s at bottom is “an increasingly complex and heterogeneous society” that’s hard to manage.

I think that proceeds from a false premise.

Our society need not be “increasingly complex and heterogeneous.” Certainly the technology we use in our society grows more complex, and even more heterogeneous (recall the hoops being jumped through to get Microsoft Windows-based programs to run on an Apple PC, or the hoops requiring satisfaction to get Linux-based systems and Microsoft-based systems to play nice together, to take just one small area). The training and education needed to operate our technologies also grows in depth, breadth, and length of time to achieve operational capacity (just try to let your Ford or Chrysler be all it can be without reading a multi-hundred page tech manual first).

But our society, our interactions with each other and our government need not be more complex or more heterogeneous. Our nation was founded on some simple principles, with personal responsibility and a personal duty to look after those who cannot look after themselves at their core. These are not complex principles. We just over-engineer them as we try to get government to do more and more for us while demanding ever greater and greater precision in execution.

Our current…heterogeneity…also results from an overemphasis of the value of other ways, other moralities, at the expense of our ways and the Judeo-Christian morality at the heart of our nation. That overemphasis flows from, among a number of causes, a lack of effort at assimilation—by us of those who come into our country and by those who come here from other countries. Too many immigrants value their old ways and morals over the ways and morals that created the environment here that contains the very opportunities for which those immigrants and visitors came. And we let them not assimilate, we don’t encourage them or help them reconcile their ways with ours and live with our ways in our house. That failure comes from the nonsense of moral equivalence.

The John Kerry-Barack Obama Plan

Posted on by
Reply

The guy who sits in the Secretary of State’s chair laid it out in his Wall Street Journal op-ed Wednesday.

Put simply, we are building a global partnership against violent extremism.

That’s so vapid and empty it doesn’t deserve comment. I include it only as an illustration of the depth of thinking and the level of importance Kerry attaches to this as sum and total of this Plan.

And this:

We must identify the zones of greatest vulnerability…. And then we must tailor our efforts and target our resources to meet the specific needs of those places. It may be training young people so they can get jobs and envision a future of dignity and self-reliance. It may be working to eliminate corruption and promote the rule of law, so that marginalized communities can enjoy security and justice.

The Community Organizer School of Realpolitik. Offering terrorists alternative career paths will set them free.

This Plan operates from a very fundamental false premise: that these terrorists don’t already see, quite clearly, their future of dignity and self-reliance, that the path they see to security and justice is not the path we prescribe. No, the terrorists of Daesh, of al Qaeda and its associates, of Boko Haram, of Jahbat al Nusra, of the Palestinian Authority, of Hezbollah, of… all see their path to dignity, to self-reliance, to their security, to their concept of justice is through the elimination of all nonbelievers and the destruction of Western Civilization, a polity they view as evil incarnate and with which they cannot coexist.

And their freedom lies in martyrdom in pursuit of that cause.

There’s also this…laugher (because the alternative is tears):

We’ve combated violent extremism before. We know there are tools that work. …we combined our efforts most recently to fight Ebola.

Oh, and this aside:

There is no room for Islamophobia or anti-Semitism.

No one is arguing otherwise, especially regarding Islamophobia. Decrying Islamic terrorists and Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islamophobia. That argument is of a piece with President Barack Obama’s statement that we’re not at war with Islam. The one is Kerry’s straw man, and the other is Obama’s. They’ll have to play with their dollies without me.

As a man said not so long ago, in America everyone has the right to be stupid.  But when it’s an American in State exercising that right, it’s downright dangerous for all of us.

A Journalistic View of the Importance of Truth

Posted on by
2

This is what too many journalists are saying about NBC’s Brian Williams’ lie about being on a helicopter in Iraq that was forced to land after being hit by an RPG. They’re making these statements, too, while eliding Williams’ subsequently discovered lies concerning his…reporting…in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and in Israel, before that, during Israel’s 2006 war with Hezbollah. First up is Howard Kurtz, author of the piece from which the rest of the quotes below are taken:

What’s been striking to me is how many people are willing to end what has been a pretty solid career because of this one admittedly horrible mistake.

That’s because the career should end. The man has destroyed his credibility with his lie—a deliberate act, not a “mistake.”

Alan Colmes, as cited by Kurtz:

[I]t was “sad” to see this mistake “destroy a man and destroy his career.

No. Whether all of this destroys Brian Williams is up to Williams alone, what he chooses to learn from this, what he chooses to do about it. Whether it destroys Williams’ journalist career, it certainly should. He lied. At least three times.

Dan Abrams:

I am troubled by the fervor, occasional glee, and potentially disproportionate fury…. This alliance of certain capital-J journalists, conservative bloggers, and some who simply despise any rich and famous journalist are a formidable force.

No journalistic distortion there. Nope.

Joe Scarborough:

…the decision is made to judge what Brian Williams’ future should be, that that decision will be based on the entirety of his career and not on one or two or three mistakes.

Mistakes. I’m detecting a theme here. When a journalist lies, that’s just a mistake. No big deal. Nothing to see here.

Scarborough again:

If he exaggerated, if he puffed his chest out a little bit—news people do that.

Lies are just puffery. And since all news people do it, it’s OK. That Left morality, again: an act’s legitimacy comes from whether or not somebody else did it, or does it, too. Morality is not at all inherent in the act.

How can anyone ever believe what a liar says? Kurtz and his fellows apparently have chosen not to answer that one.

Free Speech and Imagery

Posted on by
Reply

French film industry body ARP, made up of writers, directors and producers in France, reacted to the tragedy by praising the publication’s “historical courage” and declaring that threats will not “interfere with freedom of expression and freedom of creation.”

How many images of Mohammed are you printing today, guys?  AP?  New York Times?  Anyone?  At least the National Journal has the courage.  Such things are going up on social media; why are you guys not participating? What is it you fear so badly? Your responsibility? Or your loss of comfort?

Here are a couple, courtesy of Charlie Hebdo. Because, as Charlie says

Parce que le crayon sera toujours au dessus de la barbarie…

Parce que la liberté est un droit universel…

Or,

Because the pen is always above barbarism…

Because freedom is a universal right…

And because they now call themselves “le journal des survivants,” or “the newspaper of survivors.”Mohammed_1Mohammed_2