The Upside Down World pt. 3

Wage War to Help the Enemy

The routine murder of innocents may be protected in the clinic—but in the Upside-Down World, it is to be avoided at all costs on the battlefield. Even if it costs victory.

In the Afghanistan war—where the government and people are demonstrating sympathy for the Taliban—the top nato commander, Stanley McChrystal (before he resigned in June), was looking for ways to protect Afghan civilians. He considered a new military honor that recognizes soldiers who refrain from fighting: an award for “courageous restraint.”

Radical Muslim groups love it. They are far less concerned about civilian deaths; in fact, they invite them. They use a hodgepodge of vile, despicable tactics—purposefully embedding themselves among locals, even using schools and hospitals as staging grounds for rocket attacks—aimed specifically at provoking retribution that kills civilians (who, in many cases, actually sympathize with their cause), which they then broadly publicize for propaganda purposes. And the media and political classes eagerly trumpet that propaganda—even in cases where it is demonstrably false.

Clearly, Muslims aren’t the only ones who sympathize with terrorists; liberal intellectuals do as well.

Common sense says that someone trying to kill you and your family, someone trying to destroy your country, is an enemy. But such reasoning is far too barbaric for Western thinkers. Black-and-white morality has been replaced by a world of grays, of relativism, where even the most depraved behavior can be explained and excused. The Western mind has become deeply ambivalent about evil. Even words like evil and enemy are considered simplistic and backward.

A pillar liberal doctrine is that the perpetrators of evil acts are not responsible because they are actually victims of a far greater evil: Western ideals. Thus, “victim” groups are considered incapable of wrongdoing, while “privileged” classes are incapable of good. Muslims cannot be held responsible for terrorism—their Western targets must be the real cause.

As a result of such ridiculous moral reasoning, the very nature and purpose of warfare has been flipped topsy-turvy. War is now something a nation must do for its enemy. Humanitarian goals trump self-defense. All efforts to seek the nation’s own interests are branded immoral and shameful. An oxymoronic “humanitarian war” approach has embroiled America and its allies in absolutely impossible efforts to rebuild and rehabilitate those nations it defeats.

Success in warfare used to benefit the victorious nation; in the Upside-Down World, “victory” comes with inexhaustible, unachievable moral obligations. War can never be won.

Heroes and Villains

Hamas runs Gaza as a theocratic police state; it silences dissent; it allows no religious expression outside radical Islam; it uses terrorism to advance its foreign policy, which is to annihilate Jews. Israel, by contrast, is a liberal democracy; it has an independent judiciary and an independent press; it protects religious freedom, even for the 16 percent of its citizens who are Muslim.

Which of these two do you suppose Western elites increasingly view as a political partner—and which as a villain?

It is positively bizarre. What possesses apparently intelligent, reasonable people who value political freedoms and respect for human life to defend the terrorist cause? Why are they so willing to overlook the barbaric acts of misogyny and murder—so seemingly contrary to liberal ideals—that plague radical Islamist culture? And why, then, are they so unforgiving as Jews try to defend themselves against it?

There is no reasoned public debate over these questions. Throughout academia, the media and political circles, the supposed rightness of the Palestinian cause over that of Israel is considered irrefutable.

In Upside-Down downtown Manhattan, a retail store damaged by shrapnel from the 9/11 terrorist attacks was razed—in order to make room for a new 13-story mosque. “In the ruins of a building reduced to rubble in the name of Islam, a temple to Islam will arise,” commented author Mark Steyn.

The increasingly universal immunity to reason vividly showed this past May when authorities foiled a bombing attempt in New York City’s Times Square. As always happens when a Muslim commits or tries to commit a terrorist act, politicians and press in America and Britain disregarded facts, threw out the religion connection and searched for a cause within trivialities like the would-be bomber’s struggle to pay his mortgage. New York’s mayor speculated that he was probably a right-winger, “somebody with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill.” Wrong. Turns out the perp was on orders from the Pakistani Taliban. The mayor responded to the news by praising his city’s Pakistanis and gravely stating, “We will not tolerate any bias or backlash against Pakistani or Muslim New Yorkers.”

The rush to exhibit such multicultural sanctimony has become so predictable after such incidents. The more that Muslims attack, the louder we praise them. The same Upside-Down reaction was on parade five years ago, after Islamic suicide bombers killed 52 Londoners on their morning commute. British officials didn’t blame Islam—but Islamophobia. London’s mayor asserted that the true fault lay in “80 years of Western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of the Western need for oil.”

Reality is screaming in their faces, and they are closing their eyes, plugging their ears, and saying “La la la la la.”

Why are efforts to merely enforce existing immigration law in order to curb rising kidnapping and murder branded as racist? Why are illegal immigrants in Britain guaranteed welfare benefits by law? Why is it against the law to deport dodgy foreign terrorist suspects back to their home countries out of concern that their human rights might be violated there?

These are senseless, dangerous policies—yet intellectuals will rise up in full-throated indignation against any who dare question them.

Political correctness—a bramble bush of self-contradicting doctrines—has so ensnared the self-declared scholarly that even when facts are presented that expose the error in their thinking they will not budge.

“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” Isaiah lamented. “Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!” (Isaiah 5:20-21).

He couldn’t possibly have described the Upside-Down World with more penetrating precision.