The Redhunter

What is wrong with that? Nothing – as long as the parties to a dispute are playing by the same procedural rules, as long as the matters under dispute are truly negotiable, and as long as each side can be trusted to abide by the settlement. In other circumstances, and especially in war, anger management is a best irrelevant. “Don’t hit!” is easy advice; “Don’t hit back!” is more fraught with complexity.

The appeal to stifle our anger and negotiate our differences with extremists bent on nullifying our existence was not only irrelevant, it was immoral; it amounted to a counsel of unilateral disarmament and a denial of justice.

One saw this bias (against the employment of force by the U.S.) at work, for example, in the insistence that the war against terrorism be prosecuted by me4ans of an international coalition and not by the United States alone. Of course, there were sound strategic reasons for securing the active cooperation of others, as we did from the start. Morally, too, there is always something to be said for having an explicit seal of approval from the global community. Something, but not everything. To make such international approval a requirement of action, as if otherwise we lacked warrant to defend ourselves, was not morally sound but morally repugnant, springing from a hostility to America that had little to do with pacifism and everything to do with the larte4r political and ideological agenda of the “peace party”. The idea behind it was that we could not b e trusted to restrain ourselves – and idea that no amount of evidence to the contrary could dislodge from the minds of those holding it.

“Killing people won’t prove anything. It’s more of the same”
More of the same? Terrorists target innocent civilians by definition; they seek the destruction of innocent life. Military action to combat terrorism seeks to avoid noncombatant casualties. It’s not more of the same; it is the opposite of the same.

“You should never be violent”
…teaching children this lesson does an unforgivable injury both to them and to the adult community of which they are about to become a part. It renders them vulnerable to abuse and injury, and leaves them without moral or intellectual recourse when abuse and injury are inflicted upon them. If no distinction is made between kinds of “peace,” children are deprived of the tools they require to distinguish a just from an unjust peace, peace with honor from the peace of the grave. They are robbed of the oldest and most necessary wisdom of the race, which is that some things are worth fighting and dying for.
Are we to tell our children that, because “you should always find a peaceful way to solve your problems,” the brave men who fought in the revolutionary War, the Civil War, the two World Wars, and every other conflict in history were acting immorally? That way lies a generation prepared only for accommodation, appeasement, and surrender.

John Stuart Mill:
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of a moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth was is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight – nothing he cares about more than his own safety – is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

(on multiculturalism) In short, little schoolchildren are routinely taught that America represents but one of many cultures and in principle deserves no automatic preference, that there is no such thing as a better or worse society, that cultural values different from our own need to understood and accepted in a spirit of sympathetic tolerance, and that, all things considered, we ourselves have at least as much to answer for as to be proud of.

The nonjudgementalism with which some of us have allowed ourselves to become infected, and which we wear as a badge of tolerance, functions as an excuse for gross moral irresponsibility. Pretending to rise above the “common” view, it robs us of the ability to recognize and call things by their proper names.

Under the aegis of nonjudgementalism, some Americans have ended up tolerating, protecting, or apologizing for evil….the refusal to distinguish good from evil (or right from wrong).

…it does no good to pretend that religions and cultures are everywhere basically the same, and basically the same as the ones we happen to know.

There is a defensive and an offensive Jihad. There are tighter limits on the latter. The nature of the war between Islam and the infidels is governed by rules. There can be no killing of innocents, or terrorism.

Around the world, we have intervened repeatedly during the past decade in behalf of Muslim interests. We defended Kuwait and Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein; we stopped wholesale persecutions of Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo; we brought assistance to the Muslim nation of Somalia, we were; long the biggest provider of food in Afghanistan itself, and now we have liberated that country from the boot of the Taliban. We have often been rewarded for our efforts with petulance, double-dealing, resentment, hatred – and terror. That large parts of the Muslim world remain sunk in economic and social degradation is a fact for which we are assigned the blame.

If the Islamic world is ever to experience the uplift it has demanded, all this will have to change – on both sides. They will have to cease rejecting Western civilization and instead begin to study it, we will have to cease indulging ourselves in guilt….

…whatever the connection between hatred of Israel and hatred of America (prev: that the Muslims hate America because of our support of Israel)….one could more plausibly argue, as Norman Podhoretz did in the Wall Street Journal, …that the connection ran the other way: that “the hatred of Israel is in large part a surrogate for anti-Americanism,” and that “if Israel had never come into existence, or if it were magically to disappear, the U.S. would still stand as an embodiment of everything that most of these Arabs consider evil.”

…as Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt, put it with complete frankness, the “aggression” the Arabs sought to undo in provoking that war (1967) was the existence of Israel itself.

As the writer Norah Vincent has coldly but truly put it, “If it weren’t for our (and Israel’s) cultural commitment to tolerance and the rule of law, to the use of violence only in self-defense and to the reaching of diplomatic solutions, the Palestinian people would have no cause at all. They would not exist.”
And what if their cause should triumph? “Do you imagine,” Vincent asks, that the new state of Palestine “would be anything other than a repressive dictatorship bent on crushing it’s God-given enemies/” And “do you really suppose there would be any Jews left to protest?”

If you don't have Why We Fight on your bookshelf, get it.