Busting the Moral Equivalency Racket

When the notorious vehicles of death assaulted the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, American leftists found themselves standing on strange and uncertain ground — but in a way that differed substantially from the experience of most Americans that day.

Most of us didn’t blame America for the pilots’ murderous acts.

In the aftermath of Vietnam, self-styled progressives got used to automatically assuming the worst about U.S. foreign policy, defining themselves as permanent dissenters from a cultural center they loved to hate. Charmed for decades by Third World revolutionaries mouthing pious clichés against the accumulated evils of the West, the left faced in Osama bin Laden an enemy who shared their chronic contempt for the U.S. but made “no pretense at any universal, secular ideology that could appeal to Western liberals,” as Andrew Sullivan wrote at the time.

This was new terrain for America’s self-willed exiles in residence — but not exactly a deal breaker. Just because bin Laden didn’t inspire feelings of solidarity among reflexive critics of America’s global presence was hardly a reason to lose sight of the true culprit — America herself.

It didn’t take long for the “Not in My Name” left to settle on a two-pronged strategy: Exercise discipline by muzzling those hard to resist “America had it coming” sentiments, while staying on the outlook for opportunities to equate America’s use of force in the world with the nihilistic mayhem of Islamist terror.

The movement’s first full-dress drill in moral equivalence came just after the White House and Congress resolved to strike at the heart of bin Laden’s Afghanistan operations. Leading left intellectuals responded that when the number of civilian who died as a result of the war in Afghanistan exceeded the number of casualities caused by of Qaeda’s September 11 mayhem, the Afghanistan war would wrong, irrespective of all other factors.

This masterwork of moral blindness neglected to ask two rather basic questions. What did the Al Qaeda pilots intend to accomplish when they commandeered airplanes and crashed them into the Twin Towers? What did American soldiers intend to achieve when their actions resulted in the deaths of Afghani civilians?

For those scoring at home, here are the correct answers. Al Qaeda sought to cause as many civilian deaths as possible. If they were lucky, they might be able to kill as many as 50,000 people. No line was drawn between combatants and non-civilians; every individual in the World Trade Center was fair game. Had they the resources to take out all of Manhattan, they would have.

By contrast, American soldiers believed they were retaliating against the pilots’ sponsors and accomplices. The soldiers intended to avoid civilian casualties, and took pains to do so. Premeditated murder versus unintended killing is the operative difference.

Here’s the fundamental distinction that makes moral equivalence a grotesque joke. American society has evolved beyond the blood-red barbarism of the twelfth century. The Islamist cultures of bin Laden and Zarqawi have not. The West passed through a dynamic fulcrum called the European Enlightenment. As a result, individual freedom and self-determination are treasured values, and conflicts are resolved by reason and argument rather than recourse to custom, authority and prejudice. The Islamic world has not undergone a comparable transformation.

The radically relativist postmodern left typically responds that there’s no valid basis for making universally based value judgments about right and wrong, good and evil. But the deconstructionist credo that universal value judgments lack validity is itself a universal value judgment, one that smacks itself upside the head and cancels its own claim.

Is it conceivable that a political and cultural movement calling for the wholesale leveling of privilege and rank would promulgate procedural and philosophical rules for everyone to follow, while exempting itself? Yes, and that's exactly the point. Consistency and intellectual integrity are small beer compared with the euphoria of reflexively blaming America for everything that goes wrong in the world, while placing oneself beyond blameworthiness in communities of unanimous thought devoted absurdly to what Professor Chomsky would not think to call the “manufacture of dissent.”

At the end of the day, it’s hard to beat what Philip Roth, in his novel I Married a Communist, described as "the combination of embitterment and not thinking."

The vast majority of Americans who watched the Twin Towers incinerate and crumble recognize the lunacy of denying the reality of a fundamentaly different ethical baseline in the United States, compared with the cultures of bin Laden and Zarqawi where “so many Muslims are eager to turn themselves into bombs these days because the Koran makes this activity seem like a career opportunity,” writes Sam Harris in his recent book The End of Faith.

When the president of the United States asked Americans to volunteer blood to the Red Cross after September 11, it’s worth remembering that he didn’t also ask us to volunteer for suicide missions or to enter American mosques and start taking hostages. Here’s the money question: Even if asked to do such things, how many of us would say yes? The fact that America’s apostles of equivalence can’t answer this question without stammering pretty much says it all.

This is not to say the radical cultural left doesn't deserve the title "loyal opposition." Their opposition to America is increasingly clear. To whom or what they are loyal is rather more murky.