Sins of Goldstone

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October 6, 2009
The Liberal Sins of Moral Relativism and Moral Equivalence

By Matthew M. Hausman

In his recent report for the United Nations Human Rights Council, Richard Goldstone savaged Israel regarding the war in Gaza while exonerating Hamas, repeating as fact war crimes allegations worthy of blood libel. The report was typical of the intellectual debauchery for which the U.N. is well-known. President Obama’s subsequent address to the U.N. offered a perfect opportunity to challenge unequivocally the venomous spirit in this latest condemnation of Israel.

Instead, he took to the opportunity to chide Israel in a fawning speech in which he called Israeli “settlements” illegitimate, called for Israeli withdrawal to indefensible borders, advocated the creation of a contiguous Palestine that would cut Israel in half, and invoked anti-Israel Arab-speak in using the term “occupation” to refer to Israeli presence on ancestral Jewish soil.

Obama’s U.N. address built on the skewed framework of his Cairo speech, in which he presented Israel’s rebirth as a mistake of history perpetrated by Europe as its mea culpa for the Holocaust, and gave a revisionist account of Jewish history that was insulting, patronizing and grossly distorted. This sophistic display was paved by years of multicultural pabulum in which moral relativism or moral equivalence defined international conflict, all hatreds were deemed equal, and revisionism was wielded as a sword to hack objective history to fit political agendas. Unfortunately, American Jews have been complicit in fostering and facilitating this dynamic. Still, even politically dogmatic partisans have their breaking point, and Jewish liberals may finally be reaching theirs.

Recent polls show a significant, albeit belated, recognition by a majority of American Jews that Mr. Obama has a bias against Israel (although most still support his presidency). Despite the polls, however, many Jewish leaders continue to rationalize Obama’s consistent pattern of vilifying Israel as the obstacle to peace. Shortly after his disingenuous performance in Cairo, for example, some of the former “Rabbis for Obama” gave sermons lauding the speech for allegedly bridging the chasm between East and West. Some of these same “useful idiots” even applauded Obama’s recent U.N. address for its vision, ignoring that it was the most hostile speech regarding Israel ever delivered by a sitting U.S. President.

Many of these rabbis – primarily Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist – remain blind exponents who refuse to acknowledge the stunning omissions and untruths contained in Mr. Obama’s public comments and revisionist utterances. A current example of this selective blindness was the general acceptance of Joe Biden’s recent explanation of the President’s silence regarding the likelihood of an Israeli strike against Iran. The Vice President absurdly claimed that the Administration has a policy of not dictating to sovereign nations how they should act, despite Mr. Obama’s clear and degrading directives to Israel – largely ignored – regarding where its citizens can and can’t live. That these rabbis treat the Obama presidency as some sort of desideratum does not render his foreign policy vision pro-Israel, or even neutral. And in their refusal to acknowledge what their constituents finally seem to be grasping, they are like the caricature of a self-involved narcissist who, when spat upon in the face, believes that it’s raining.

These same rabbinical boosters have no credible explanation for Mr. Obama’s use of the world stage to scold Israel regarding the “settlements,” to demand that she negotiate away her undivided capitol, and to call for withdrawal to indefensible borders. One questions whether they truly believe in Mr. Obama with the same missionary zeal they exhibited during last year’s election, or simply feel compelled by the instinct not to admit they were wrong. Whatever the motivation, the polls clearly show that a growing percentage of their congregants now recognize the President’s bias.
But the question is whether the rank-and-file truly understand the nature of this prejudice. Are they aware of Mr. Obama’s facile reliance on revisionist history? Do they recognize how his perspective is influenced by the doctrines of moral relativism and moral equivalence? And do they finally realize that liberal discomfort with Israel is indeed nourished by left-wing disparagement of Jewish history and values? If not, they need to educate themselves concerning the intellectual roots of Mr. Obama’s perspective, which is the sum of all these factors.

Moral Relativism
Israel’s critics often invoke moral relativism to justify making demands of Israel while refusing to hold her enemies accountable for acts of terror, provocation or simple rejection. Moral relativism rejects the concept of absolute morality, holding instead that standards of right and wrong are relative to particular societal, cultural or historical experiences, and that there are no ethical or moral universal constants. Some moral relativists believe, as did Jean-Paul Sartre, that the ethics and morality underlying every action are subjective and peculiar to the individual. Whether individualistic or culturally specific, however, moral relativism is contrary to the moral absolutist view, inherent in most religions, which expresses the ethical belief that certain conduct is absolutely good or evil.

According to moral relativists, terrorism is not immoral when it arises from a culture in which such conduct is an organically acceptable expression. Thus, moral relativists justify, or at least refuse to condemn, Arab terrorism because it is not considered wrong in Muslim/Arab society. In their minds, terrorism is a legitimate expression of the Arab national will, and accordingly they see no inconsistency in condemning Israel for defending herself or responding to acts of terrorist aggression, regardless of the underlying circumstances.

The glaring irony, of course, is that a true moral relativist should likewise not condemn Israel for defending herself against terror if her reactions are deemed organic expressions shaped by Israeli society and Jewish culture. The use of moral relativism to exonerate the terrorists but condemn the Israeli response is intellectually dishonest, and is really more an expression of moral equivalence. Indeed, many consider moral equivalence synonymous with moral relativism, although they are actually separate and distinct philosophical concepts.

Moral Equivalence
Moral equivalence holds that parties to a conflict are judged according to their identities, not by their actions, and that reactions cannot be judged out of context from the precipitating primary actions. The concept is attributed to William James from his 1910 essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War.” Applying this theory to the Mideast conflict, Arab terrorism is judged against the perception of Arab victimhood. In this paradigm, Israel is considered inherently immoral, such that any hostile Arab conduct – no matter how heinous – becomes morally justified. Moreover, because Israel’s very existence is considered unjust her defensive actions can never be morally condoned, while Arab terrorists are given license to attack even civilians with moral impunity because of their perceived posture as victims. Under this dynamic, a sovereign nation is not permitted to defend itself without criticism even when its civilians are the targets of unprovoked terror attacks, as long as the aggressors are seen as morally superior.

Although it is intellectually dishonest to equate acts of terror and provocation with legitimate acts of self-defense, those who claim to be guided by moral equivalence can only apply the concept to Israel by delegitimizing her existence. In order to do so, however, they must accept the unhistorical Arab narrative in which Jews are strangers to the Middle East, Israel is a colonial power, and Palestinians are believed to have inhabited the land for thousands of generations as a distinct people and culture. Or, moral equivalence is invoked simply to rationalize antisemitic impulses, so that Israel’s acts of self-defense will never be considered morally superior to unprovoked terrorism against its civilians.

Generally, those who claim to espouse moral equivalence seem motivated by anti-Israel animus regardless of claims of philosophical objectivity. How else to explain the blanket refusal to condemn the terrorist strategy of putting Arab civilians at risk, or the failure to recognize Israel’s documented efforts to prevent or minimize noncombatant injuries? Rather, these philosophical dilettantes use the concept to condemn only Israel for the use of force, while refusing to criticize Arab terrorism at all. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Goldstone report, which uniformly condemns Israel for unsubstantiated abuses, but is silent regarding Hamas’s documented war crimes in targeting Jewish civilians while using Arab civilians as shields.

When confronted with the inconsistent application of these concepts, Israel’s critics often descend to a cruder philosophical level, holding that the Arab hatred of Jews and Israel is justified by supposed Jewish hatred and discrimination of the Arabs. Such claims are absurd, however, because (a) Jews never systematically discriminated or conspired against Arabs, but were themselves subjugated and abused, and (b) not all hatreds are equal.

All Hatreds are not Equal
Whether invoking moral relativism or moral equivalence, those who strain to justify Arab terrorism as a legitimate expression of national aspirations seem to have been weaned on the concept that all hatreds are equal. They justify the Arab response to the Jewish presence in the Middle East as a reaction to Jewish hatred of Arabs and Islam, although in doing so they must rely on historical fiction and ignore present-day reality. That is, there is nothing within Jewish culture or religion that preaches hatred of or incitement against Arabs or Islam, and there is no historical record of Jews subjugating or imposing their will on Arabs or Muslims. The only “fact” on which these critics rely is the myth that Israel was created on the ruins of a preexisting country and the displacement of its people. Yet, it is undeniable that a country called “Palestine” never existed, and that Palestinian peoplehood is a modern political contrivance.

These critics of Israel disingenuously ignore the very real hatred rooted in Arab culture and Islamic belief, starting in the Quran itself, with the account of the slaughter of the Jews of Yathrib (al-Medina), and the teaching of the Hadith concerning the extermination of the Jews at the end of days. Moreover, they turn a blind eye to the precarious history of Jews in Islamic society and Arab lands, where they were socially repressed, forced to live in ghettos, periodically subjected to massacres and pogroms, dispossessed of civil rights and often considered chattels of the suzerainty. The concept of Islamic tolerance is a myth with no basis in reality, and is incompatible with the concept of jihad.

Sometimes, criticism of Israel and the Jews is informed by a benign naiveté born of multicultural philosophy that does not understand the historical antecedents of Arab-Muslim hatred of Israel, the Jewish People, and indeed all non-Muslim society. Although these people blithely argue that all hatred is equal, they seem to have no problem justifying Arab and Muslim intolerance or denying its existence. Historically, such a position is nonsensical, dishonest and ignorant. Moreover, not all hatreds are equal.

Antisemitism goes back thousands of years, has religious, cultural, ethnic and economic components, and has been manifested repeatedly through massacres, forced conversions, enforced ghettos, physical and cultural rape, dehumanization and systematic genocide. Indeed, we know, for example, of the Hellenistic anti-Jewish riots in Alexandria in 3rd Century B.C.E. and 38 C.E. as related by Philo; the barbarity of the Hadrianic persecutions during the war with Rome; the persistent abuse and scorn of the Catholic Church; the degradations of the Fourth Lateran Council; the Crusades; the Chelmnitzky massacres; the Inquisition; the May Laws; the murderous indignities imposed on Jews as dhimmis in Muslim society; and the pervasive social isolation and exclusion in Europe and the Arab lands. Jews constitute the most persistently persecuted minority on earth.

In contrast, “Islamophobia” was coined as a conceptual counterbalance to antisemitism in order to camouflage or trivialize the very real Arab and Islamic hatred of Jews. But neither Muslims nor Arabs are in the minority and have never been singled out for discrimination and abuse as Jews have been. Moreover, Islam is not defined on racial or ethnic grounds, but rather constitutes solely a belief system – and a totalitarian one at that. Those who invoke the Crusades as examples of extreme Christian hatred of Islam conveniently forget that they were preceded by the Arab-Muslim conquest of much of Europe between the 8th and 15th Centuries. To be sure, the Crusaders were murderers, thugs, rapists, and thieves who mercilessly tortured, abused and slaughtered Jews wherever they found them. With respect to the Arabs, however, the Crusaders were paying back in kind what the Arab-Muslim hordes had wrought in Europe.

Against this backdrop, it seems clear that the term “Islamophobia” is used as a disingenuous tool to enable Muslims and Arabs to claim that they are just as persecuted as the Jews “claim to be.” It is also invoked to quell any discussion of their own history as colonial expansionists and persecutors of religious and ethnic minorities, which history is evidenced today by, among other things, the discrimination of the Copts in Egypt, the destruction of Hindu shrines in Afghanistan, and the spreading of jihad in the West. This is the same mindset that encouraged many Nazi war criminals to “hide in plain sight” by masquerading as victims of Nazi persecution.

Regardless of what philosophical concept critics rely on to demonize Israel, any criticism of her right to exist as a Jewish country is intellectually dishonest, is founded on an affirmative disregard of history, and is morally unsustainable. Thus, it is not enough for American Jews now to feel discomfort with the President’s apparent biases and his selective recitations of history. They need to understand how these biases have been fed and nurtured if they are to confront them within their political circles and correct the slanted perceptions in accordance with historical reality.