Another viewpoint with some good questions for Muslims and us.

[J. Paul Everett]

Charles Krauthammer / Syndicated columnist

This is not the time for moral relativism



WASHINGTON - In the wake of a massacre that killed more than 5,000

innocent Americans in a day, one might expect moral clarity. After all, four

days after Pearl Harbor, the isolationist America First Committee (which

included such well-meaning young people as Gerald Ford and Potter

Stewart) formally disbanded. There had been argument and confusion about

America's role in the world and the intentions of its enemies. No more.


And yet, within days of the World Trade Center massacre, an event of

blinding clarity, we are beginning to hear the prominent voices of moral

obtuseness.


Susan Sontag, a leading leftist intellectual, is appalled at "the
self-righteous

drivel" that this was an "attack on 'civilization' " rather than on America
as "a

consequence of specific American alliances and actions. How many citizens

are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq?"


What Sontag is implying, but does not quite have the courage to say, is that

because of these "alliances and actions," such as the bombing of Iraq, we

had it coming. The implication is as disgusting as Jerry Falwell blaming the

attack on sexual deviance and abortion, except that Falwell's excrescences

appear on loony TV; Sontag's in The New Yorker.


Let us look at those policies. The bombing of Iraq? First, we are not

bombing Iraqi civilians. We attack anti-aircraft positions that are trying to

shoot down our planes. Why are our planes there? To keep Iraq from

projecting its power to re-invade and re-attack its neighbors.


Why are we keeping Saddam in his box? Because we know he is

developing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and we know of what

he is capable: He has already gassed 5,000 Kurds, used chemical weapons

against Iran and launched missiles into Tehran, Riyadh and Tel Aviv with the

explicit aim of murdering as many people as possible.


Or maybe Sontag means American support for Israel. Perhaps she means

that America should have abandoned Israel - after it made its astonishingly

generous peace offer to the Palestinians and was rewarded with a guerrilla

war employing the same terrorist savagery that we witnessed on Sept. 11.


Let us look at American policies. America conducted three wars in the

1990s. The Gulf War saved the Kuwaiti people from Saddam. American

intervention in the Balkans saved Bosnia. We saved Kosovo from Serbia.

What do these three campaigns have in common? In every one we saved a

Muslim people.


And then there was Somalia, a military operation of unadulterated altruism.

Its sole purpose was to save the starving people of Somalia. Muslims all.


For such alliances and actions, we get over 5,000 Americans murdered, or,

as Sontag puts it, "last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality."


Moral obtuseness is not restricted to intellectuals. I was subjected to a High

Holiday sermon by a guest rabbi warning the congregation, exactly seven

days after our generation's Pearl Harbor, against "oversimplifying" by

dividing the world into "good guys and bad guys."


Oversimplifying? Has there ever been a time when the distinction between

good and evil was more clear?


And where are the Muslim clerics - in the United States, Europe and the

Middle East - who should be joining together to make that distinction with

loud unanimity? Where are their fatwas against suicide murder? Where are

the authoritative communal declarations that these crimes are contrary to

Islam? President Bush said so in his visit to Washington's main mosque. But

Bush is a Christian. He is a hardly an authority on Islam.


Why did the spiritual leader of the Islamic Society of North America, Dr.

Muzammil Siddiqi, not say that terrorism is contrary to Islam in his address

at the national prayer service? His words went out around the world. Yet he

was vague and elusive. "But those that lay the plots of evil, for them is a

terrible penalty."


Very true. But who are the layers of plots of evil? Those who perpetrated

the World Trade Center attack? Or America, as thousands of Muslims in

the street claim? The imam might have made that clear. He did not.


This is no time for obfuscation. Or for agonized relativism. Or, obscenely,

for blaming America first. (The habit dies hard.) This is a time for clarity.
At

a time like this, those who search for shades of evil, for root causes, for

extenuations are, to borrow from Lance Morrow, "too philosophical for

decent company."


Charles Krauthammer's column appears Monday on editorial pages of

The Times. The Washington Post Writers Group can be contacted via

e-mail at writersgrp at washpost.com.


Copyright © 2001 The Seattle Times Company

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