Exploring the Worst Kind of Racism

I know I haven’t written in a really long time, but I read something today that needed to be addressed. I received an editorial article via email forward  that really evoked my ire.  Now, before I get to tearing this article apart, I would like to afford you all (assuming I have any readers anymore) the opportunity to read it. Like I said, I received it in an email, and I have no link to it, so here it is, copied and pasted in it’s entirety:

Sometimes it is more essential to define the nature of evil than good

By Jonathan Rosenblum

Upon his first visit to one of the liberated death camps, Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “There are those who ask what are we fighting for. Let them come here and see what we are fighting against.” Eisenhower’s remark contains an important insight: Sometimes it is more essential that one define the nature of evil than that one define what is good. About the latter, there will inevitably be many opinions. But they need not prevent a consensus from coalescing around the definition of evil.

I was reminded of that point last week as I watched The Third Jihad, the third in a trilogy of documentaries on the threat of radical Islam produced by Raphael Shore and Wayne Kopping. Towards the end of the documentary one of the experts interviewed, former CIA intelligence officer Clare Lopez declared, “The real war is between the values of freedom and barbarism. If we are not willing to recognize the battle as one for our civilization, we might as well give up right now.”

The last time the West faced such a civilizational threat, many refused to recognize the nature of the conflict. In Troublesome Young Me, Lynne Olsen offers a gripping account of the group of youthful Conservative backbenchers, who eventually ousted British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain from power and brought in Winston Churchill in his place, nearly a year after the outbreak of World War II.

England entered that war totally unprepared, and lagging far behind Germany in every respect, apart from its navy. Even after Britain proclaimed war, following the Nazi invasion of Poland, Chamberlain pursued it half-heartedly and dreamed of an imminent peace. Britain and France bombed only German military targets most narrowly defined. Meanwhile Luftwaffe pilots in Poland followed orders to “close [their] hearts to pity,” happily machine-gunning women and girls picking potatoes, bombing churches and hospitals, and strafing toddlers being herded to safety.

The parallels between today and the earlier period are eerie. Chamberlain, like President Obama today, enjoyed an overwhelming majority in Parliament. His party whips enforced party discipline with an iron hand — think Rahm Emanuel — and backbenchers who stepped out of line put their political futures on the line.

In another interesting parallel, Chamberlain enjoyed almost across the board fawning support from the press and the BBC. That included self-imposed censorship on the information reaching the British public. After the Anschluss, British papers carried no pictures of the hundreds shot in the first days after the Nazi takeover, of the tens of thousands arrested and sent to concentration camps, or of Nazi soldiers forcing Jewish doctors, lawyers and professors to scrub the streets and clean toilets on their hands and knees. When reporters asked Chamberlain about such matters, he snapped at them for believing “Jewish-Communist propaganda,” and that was the end of the matter.

The British press ignored both the massive German arms build-up prior to the War, and the pitiful state of British preparedness. Both before and after the conflict started, it suppressed mention or quotations from Hitler’s speeches that would have conveyed a much different impression of his goals. As a British TV character tartly observed forty years later, “It is hard to censor the press when it wants to be free, but easy if it gives up its freedom voluntarily.”

Chamberlain never read Mein Kampf, in which Hitler laid out in startling fashion both his future plans for the Jews and for German conquest. Far from viewing Hitler as an evil man, Chamberlain believed him to be a “gentleman,” with whom he could do business. He was more than once shocked to find that Hitler had lied to him, even though that too was foreshadowed in Mein Kampf, Said future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, “He didn’t believe people existed [who would] say one thing and do another. …It was pathetic, really.”

Chamberlain, according to Olsen, ”could never bring himself to believe that [Hitler and Mussolini] wanted to go to war. Clinging to the security of his ignorance, he created a peace-loving image of them that defied reality.” For a decade, the English and French did nothing in response to fascist aggression in Abyssinia (Ethiopia), Austria, and Czechoslovakia, and precious little even in the wake of the German invasion of Poland.

France and England thereby encouraged Hitler to believe they were too weak to prevail, a judgment in which he was very nearly right. That should have taught us — but did not — that those who hope to avoid war via appeasement inevitably end up fighting later on worse terms.

At no point, did Chamberlain recognize that Hitler constituted a mortal threat to Western civilization. As a consequence, he displayed far more ruthlessness fighting those within his own party who dared challenge his policies than he did in fighting Hitler.

The inability to recognize Hitler as evil incarnate is the most frightening parallel to today. President Ronald Reagan was reviled by Western elites for calling the Soviet Union the Evil Empire, as was President George W. Bush for grouping Iran, North Korea, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq together as the Axis of Evil.

The West still remains incapable of acknowledging evil or giving credence to the pronouncements of evil men. Ayatollah Khomeini long ago made clear that he was prepared to see Iran go up “in flames,” if the worldwide rule of Islam were thereby furthered. Mutual assured destruction, says Bernard Lewis, the greatest living authority on Islam, is for Ahmadinejad, “not a deterrent but an incentive.” Surveying the scene in Beslan, where Chenyan Muslims killed nearly 300 Russian schoolchildren, one of the speakers on The Third Jihad puts the point succinctly: Why should those who don’t hesitate to send out their own children to be killed hesitate to kill other peoples’ children?

Yet the highest wisdom in the West today is to not take seriously the threats of Ahmadinejad or the speculations of the Iranian leadership about the mathematics of a nuclear exchange with Israel. They are not madmen, we are constantly told.

President Obama has no taste for confrontation with radical Islam (only with Israel). He cannot even admit that it exists. Evil, it seems, is one of the few words that does not come trippingly off his tongue.

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That was a wonderful little literary adventure for all of you, I’m sure. I will now attempt, in a comparable number of words, to convince you that Mr.  Rosenblum is a sadly misguided individual whose argument carries no merit whatsoever.  Staying true to the format of this blog, here are the reasons, in a tidy little Top 5 list:

5. His initial premise is flawed and unsupported.

The author delivers a broad premise in his title, that “sometimes it is more essential to define the nature of evil than good”. This is an interesting point of debate, from a moral standpoint. The problem is, he spends no time defining what good or evil actually are, or explaining why it is harder/less essential to define good than it is to define evil.  He seems to take for granted that people will agree with him that Hitler is evil incarnate (not an unreasonable assumption) and that modern Muslims are in the same category (much harder to swallow, particularly without significant support).

The way I see it, Good and Evil both lie on the same spectrum, and thus must be defined in relation to each other. There are many actions that are good, many that are evil, and many that lie somewhere in between. The problem with defining the West (US, Israel, etc.) as “Good” and Islam as “Evil”, is that it grossly oversimplifies the argument.  (Note: I know that Mr. Rosenblum does not claim to define any “good”, but the assertion of his article that Muslims are “Evil” implies that we are at the least “better”, if not “good”.) He hints at definitions of “Evil”, such as killing innocent women and children, but under that definition, almost any nation that has undertaken military action (including the US military presence currently stationed in Iraq) could be considered evil. I don’t think that is an argument that he is trying to make. Herein lies the problem of not actually defining what makes a group of people “good” or “evil”, when that is your stated premise.

Another interesting point: Mr Rosenblum talks about “radical Islam”, but he doesn’t take the time to define what he means by this, leaving it as a generalization. This is the rhetorical equivalent of defining the “Christian Right” as “people who bomb abortion clinics and murder doctors”. This is yet another example of how “the definition of evil”, apparently the premise of the article, is markedly absent from the body of the work.

4. His article is riddled with hypocrisy

There are two sources of hypocrisy in this article, only one of which I will address here, because the other source of hypocrisy is actually my number one reason that Mr. Rosenblum is full of it. The first source of hypocrisy is not stated outright, but more subtly implied. Mr Rosenblem implies, by stating that the US need not get tripped up in defining what is “good”, that we do not always need to take good or honorable steps to fight terrorism — that sometimes we need to resort to things that we don’t consider good, such as waterboarding, and detention of prisoners without trial, or even sufficient evidence to press charges. This is hypocrisy on a national level that our government has indulged in for some time. The reason it is hypocritical is because these actions by our government spit in the face of our national identity. The founding fathers conceived of a nation in which citizens and individuals would be free from tyranny, which is why we have rights such as habeus corpus, and the right to a fair trial. The founding fathers would be appalled by legislation such as the Patriot Act that strips away these civil liberties, or the govnernment holding (and sometimes torturing) prisoners without charges or trial in offshore locations such as Guantanamo Bay. I know I am appalled. Maybe that’s hubris on my part, thinking that the Founding Fathers would think the way I do. However, they did seem to care enough about these ideas to put them in the Constitution….

3. He ignores significant developments in current events that contradict his point.

Iran, part of Bush’s (and apparently Mr. Rosenblum’s) Axis of Evil, recently had presidential elections. There has been somewhat of a controversy involving allegations that the Iranian government falsified the election results. These allegations rest on two major points:

-All major polls leading up to the elections showed Ahmedinejad’s rival to be leading by a significant margin, not trailing 66 to 33 percent as the final election tally reflected.

-The Iranian government announced the results an hour after the polls closed, even though there were over 35 million paper ballots to be counted.

This story has two sides. The first side is obviously outrage at the Iranian government for undermining their own democracy. If the government actually falsified the election results in order to stay in power, that is nothing less than tyranny. However, the other side of the story, the silver lining, is that if the allegations are true, then it seems that the majority of the Iranian people want to modernize and move toward a more western society! That is a very positive sign, and would show that Obama’s heightened rhetoric and extension of a friendly hand toward the Middle East is more forward thinking than it is naive. The elections in Lebanon, where the people actually elected a more progressive government, point toward the same conclusion. It would appear that not everyone in the Middle East is out to bomb the US or Israel after all.

2. He leaves out very important parts of the story.

As I recall, didn’t the Allies win World War II? Yes, appeasement was a mistake, and yes, the Allies (including England) were underprepared from a military standpoint. However, when the Allied Powers realized what was going on, they banded together to defeat the Nazis and liberate the nations (and peoples) that the Nazis were oppressing. The Bush administration tried to use Appeasement as an example of why we had to invade Iraq, a decision which most people will now admit was a mistake. Yes, Hitler was a terrible person. Yes, Hitler was worse than world leaders could realize at the time, which allowed him to become more powerful than he should have. But if we immediately assume that everyone who has conflicting interests with the United States or Israel is as bad as Hitler, then aren’t we bound to overreact fairly regularly? We overreacted in Iraq, and that has cost the lives of thousands of US soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians (plus trillions of dollars and an unprecedented government deficit). I, for one, am glad that Obama hasn’t over-reacted yet.

1. He is the worst kind of racist

The second type of hypocrisy that I hinted at earlier basically runs as follows: How is labelling an entire group of people (be it Muslims, Iranians, whomever Mr. Rosenblum is tirading against here) any better than how Hitler labeled the Jews back in the times of World War II? Bush, who coined the term “Axis of Evil”, also talked about the “ideology of hate” that Muslims have toward the West? How are the sweeping generalizations made by this type of article any different? If you label an entire group of people as “Evil”, you are dehumanizing them and breaking the common bond that we share as citizens of this planet. What happened to the Christian motto of “hate the sin, love the sinner?” Last time I checked, it wasn’t written anywhere as “hate the sin, hate the Muslims”. Yes, the people who attacked the US on September 11th were terrible people. So were the people who attacked the London subway, and any other examples of Muslim terrorist attacks that have happened in the last 10 years. But you know what? So are Timothy McVey and the Unabobmer. So are the people who bomb abortion clinics and murder doctors. You can’t judge an entire group of people based on horrifically violent outliers. That’s just insane. You can level attacks at Ahmedinejad or the Iranian government for being tyrants, you can condemn the attacks and efforts of specific terrorist groups, but you cannot support this type of hate speech, or embrace racial profiling, or embrace any other type of dehumanizing generalizations against Muslims as a people. To try to convince people that Muslims are the definition of “evil incarnate” is worse than calling them towel heads, or sand *****’s, or any number of disrespectful epithets that we discourage people from using. It is the worst kind of racism there is, because it is the kind of racism that encourages people to take hateful action.

Well, it’s good to be back, and it feels good to get that off my chest. I welcome any comments, and I will try to get in the habit of writing semi-regularly again. Tootles.