by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
Private Papers<\/em><\/p>\n T<\/span>he West\u2019s condemnation of Israel\u2019s accidental shelling of two Palestinian Arab houses that killed 18 people once more reveals the bizarre incoherence that addles our thinking. The jihadists for years have purposely used their own families as cover for attacks in order to create exactly what we are seeing now: Israel\u2019s accidental killing of women and children while attempting to protect their own elicits from the West vehement condemnations that ignore the jihadists\u2019 culpability in putting their own people at risk. Meanwhile,\u00a0deliberate<\/i>killing and shelling of Israelis is met with generic condemnations of the \u201ccycle of violence,\u201d usually delivered with an accusatory finger pointed at Israel.<\/p>\n The moral principle involved isn\u2019t hard to understand. If I shoot at your wife and child while standing behind mine, it is\u00a0my<\/i>\u00a0fault if my wife and child are killed when you try to defend yourself. There is no moral imperative that says I must value the lives of your family more than the lives of my own. Except for Israel, apparently. Only the Jews are required year after year to sacrifice their citizens and show \u201crestraint\u201d as the necessary preconditions for some mythic \u201cpeaceful solution.\u201d Meanwhile there is no evidence that this \u201csolution\u201d is really what the majority of Palestinian Arabs and Muslim nations want more than they want the destruction of Israel.<\/p>\n The failure of the West to understand this moral calculus is perfectly understood by the jihadist terrorists. Indeed, that failure is precisely why terrorism is used. The jihadists are happy to sacrifice their own people in order to produce the images of suffering eagerly devoured by the Western media, thus further eroding support for Israel. The recent war in Lebanon is just the latest example of this tactic. No matter how carefully Israel tries to calibrate its legitimate response to an enemy\u2019s aggression, the inadvertent deaths of non-combatants \u2014 which necessarily accompany the destruction of an enemy hiding among civilians \u2014 are decried as the fruit of Israel\u2019s callous use of \u201cdisproportionate\u201d force. The responsibility of those who hide and fight among civilians is simply shrugged away.<\/p>\n In other words, the jihadists are winning the psychological war because they know well the West\u2019s core weakness: believing only in material life as the highest good, the West finds suffering intolerable, even that of an enemy who wants to destroy us. Thus we apply utopian standards of conduct to the treatment and interrogation of callous murderers, as our own Supreme Court did when it applied the Geneva Conventions to terrorists who don\u2019t even meet the Conventions\u2019 own definition of combatants entitled to such protections.<\/p>\n A<\/span>verse as we are to accepting the tragic consequences that always attend the use of force, we indulge the therapeutic illusion that all conflict can be resolved not by force but by negotiation, talk, and concessions. We can\u2019t get it into our heads that there are people driven by spiritual imperatives that cannot be bargained or negotiated away. Only force will convince such people to abandon their aims. But force is messy, unpredictable, sometimes brutal and indiscriminate, as every war ever fought teaches us. Yet we cannot accept that tragic truth, and so put constraints on our use of force that cripples us in our fight against an enemy who recognizes no restraints whatsoever.<\/p>\n Indeed, every time we apologize for the inadvertent deaths that are part and parcel of armed conflict, we convince the jihadist that his estimation of us is correct: we don\u2019t believe in what we fight for as powerfully as he believes in what\u00a0he<\/i>\u00a0fights for. That\u2019s why the jihadist never apologizes. Go back and see if you can find any Arab or Muslim leader or spokesman, after a murderer has blown up a dozen Israelis, who shows the kind of regret and remorse that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert demonstrated after the accidental bombing, let alone apologize.<\/p>\n What you get instead are generic condemnations of terrorism that make an exception of jihadist violence, since it is considered legitimate \u201cresistance\u201d to an \u201cillegal occupation.\u201d And the condemnation is frequently aimed not at terrorism per se, but at its untimely tactical use. No, the jihadists and their supporters don\u2019t apologize because they believe they are right, and that such violence is justified in the pursuit of their divinely sanctioned aims. Our acceptance of this double standard is another sign that we are spiritually weak and so can be defeated.<\/p>\n A<\/span>nother way to see how our anxious apologies and intolerance of suffering encourages the terrorist is to consider the case of Russia. For over a century Russia and then the USSR dominated and oppressed Central Asian Muslims. The Soviets then brutalized Afghanistan in an attempt to retain control over its government, and failed only because of the support of the West for the jihadists battling the Soviet army. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the attempt by Muslims in Chechnya to gain their independence has been brutally suppressed at the cost of perhaps 50,000 dead and the near destruction of it major city Grozny.<\/p>\n So is Russia, its hands red with Muslim blood, the \u201cGreat Satan\u201d of the jihadists and their state sponsor, Iran? Of course not. The United States is: a country that never colonized or ruled a Muslim nation, a country that helped Muslims in Afghanistan, a country that liberated Muslim Kuwait, a country that bombed and killed Christian Serbs to protect Balkan Muslims, a country that has spent its blood and treasure getting rid of Iran\u2019s most bitter enemy and the Shia Muslims\u2019 worst oppressor, Saddam Hussein, a country that even now is fighting to empower Iran\u2019s fellow Shiites.\u00a0We<\/i>\u00a0are the Great Satan, while the Iranian mullocracy happily does business with the Russians and seldom says a word of condemnation against them.<\/p>\n Why is this so? Obviously, Russia serves Iran\u2019s interests by helping with their nuclear development and protecting its interests on the Security Council. But there\u2019s another important reason Russia\u2019s much more extensive crimes against Islam are given a pass: the jihadists know the Russians are not susceptible to the therapeutic blackmail used against a self-loathing West. Russia uses brutal force to promote and defend its interests and doesn\u2019t give a damn what the rest of the world thinks. Indeed, according to the latest report on the May 2005 Beslan massacre of school children by Chechnyan terrorists, the Russians initiated the fire-fight, callously sacrificing their own citizens in order to destroy the terrorists and perhaps send a message that hostage-taking isn\u2019t going to work.<\/p>\n I<\/span>n contrast, for decades we in the West have solicited the good will of Muslim nations, especially by acquiescing in the transformation of the prime victim of jihadist aggression, Israel, into the aggressor. We pretended a corrupt terrorist thug, Yasser Arafat, was a statesman, and gave billions to the Palestinian Authority, a glorified gang that did nothing for its people and spent our money on the weapons and explosives used to blow up Israelis. We did nothing while states like Syria and Iran hosted terrorist organizations and funded terrorist attacks, including the murder of our own citizens. And we continued to play the phony game of \u201ctalks\u201d and \u201cagreements,\u201d which delivered nothing while allowing the jihadists to strengthen their positions and stockpile more weapons and missiles to use against Israel, as is currently happening in Gaza.<\/p>\n For all those years we failed to see that Israel is the front-line of the modern jihad against the West. In that conflict have been perfected the important tactics used by the jihadists, who know they cannot prevail militarily and so must fight a psychological war. They know that they can play on the West\u2019s sentimental aversion to suffering, its deluded faith in rational discussion for the resolution of conflict, its fear of force and its consequences, its anxiety over the opinion of its enemy, and its instinctive self-loathing and eagerness to wear the hair-shirt of guilt \u2014 all pathologies born of the West\u2019s spiritual poverty, its disbelief in anything other than its own material and psychological comfort. And every time we criticize Israel for doing nothing other than trying to protect its citizens against a fanatic enemy, we prove to the jihadist that he is right.<\/p>\n Bruce Thornton is the author of\u00a0Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality,<\/i>writes for\u00a0The New Individualist\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0The Claremont Review,\u00a0<\/i>and currently teaches at California State University, Fresno.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jihadists see West’s tragic flaw in blinkered tolerance by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The West\u2019s condemnation of Israel\u2019s accidental shelling of two Palestinian Arab houses that killed 18 people once more reveals the bizarre incoherence that addles our thinking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,765],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1rc","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5468,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/murder-in-gaza-why-israel-and-not-fatah-is-demonized\/","url_meta":{"origin":5530,"position":0},"title":"Murder in Gaza: Why Israel and not Fatah is Demonized","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 14, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers In Gaza the fighting between Fatah and Hamas has escalated to the point of all-out civil war, replete with dead women and children, kneecapping, and handcuffed prisoners thrown from roofs. Meanwhile in Lebanon, the Lebanese army continues to shell a Palestinian refugee camp, with\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5522,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/high-anxiety\/","url_meta":{"origin":5530,"position":1},"title":"High Anxiety","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 20, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"How modernity feeds Arab anti-Semitism by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers There\u2019s an Elvis Costello lyric that goes, \u201cI used to be disgusted; now I try to be amused.\u201d Before 9\/11 that was pretty much my philosophy. Working in the university, I was daily treated to the postmodern mumbo-jumbo, multicultural\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5547,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/inside-the-cease-fire\/","url_meta":{"origin":5530,"position":2},"title":"Inside the “Cease-fire”","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 23, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"U.N.'s looming failure reveals West's moral confusion by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers With every crisis in the war against Islamic jihad, the West displays a suicidal appeasement that heartens the enemy and lessens any chance of victory. The absurd \u201ccease fire\u201d the U.N. recently hammered out between Israel and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5157,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/fig-leaf-diplomacy\/","url_meta":{"origin":5530,"position":3},"title":"Fig-Leaf Diplomacy","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 16, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"The madness of financial support to a hostile Hamas. by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The drama being played out between Hamas and the West grows stranger by the minute, exposing the cultural toxins that are weakening our resolve in the fight against jihad. The murderous aims of Hamas are\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3088,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-fellow-travelers-of-jihadism\/","url_meta":{"origin":5530,"position":4},"title":"The Fellow Travelers of Jihadism","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 17, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society The post-mortem revelations of Osama bin Laden\u2019s daily habits have confirmed the orthodox narrative about the al-Qaeda chief. Rather than a traditionalist conservative Muslim, bin Laden has been caricatured as a mentally unstable fringe figure, a narcissistic megalomaniac who \u201chighjacked\u201d Islamic doctrine\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5553,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/no-resolution-at-all-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":5530,"position":5},"title":"No Resolution At All","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 13, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Why the U.N. can't solve the problem of Hezbollah by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The U.N. resolution that supposedly will solve the problem of Hezbollah is a perfect example of the delusions inhibiting the West in its fight against jihadist terror. According to the resolution, the current impotent U.N.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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