August 8th, '06
One of My Neighbors Speaks Up

Gavriel is a friend of mine. Our daughters go to school together. His blog, AbbaGov, is a great place to visit.

Yesterday, Gavriel really hit the nail on the head.

Monday, August 07, 2006
A Few Points That Are Not Morally Equivalent

Moral relativism has been around a long time now, and while its inherent hazards as a practical philosophy have been readily apparent, its more esoteric decrees have sometimes seemed more ridiculous than dangerous.

But now, at least in this controversial little corner of the world where I live, relativism's pronouncements are getting harder to laugh off. Especially the accusations of those who believe Israel's decades-long struggle just to exist is morally equivalent to the violence continually waged against it. After all, they can say, violence is violence and a dead civilian doesn't care whether death arrived by suicide bomb or the explosion of an artillery shell taking out a rocket launcher.

If the only goal of such foolishness was to demoralize Israelis and persuade us to stop using sufficient strength for our own defense, then we could just power up the stupidity filters and ignore it. The idea of moral relativists coming to anyone and trying to change their beliefs in any way is an amusing irony we would love to simply file away for a good chuckle on a rainy day.

But the problem is that they are not just trying to change our minds here in Israel, to convince us our self-defense is only justified if we can stop our attackers' violence non-violently -- or at least non-violently enough that our attackers don't end up regretting their violence. They are also trying to convince the rest of the world that Israel's self-defense is illegitimate and undeserving of support, and that matters. It matters for us, because no country truly stands alone, no matter how resilient and determined it is. And it matters to the rest of the world, because bad habits and self-defeating beliefs are easy to pick up, especially when the dangers are temptingly easy to ignore because they appear to be someone else's problem.

So I say it plainly: the morality of Israel's self-defense is superior to the morality of those who attack her, decade after decade, through wars of annihilation and pizzeria suicide bombings alike.

Read the whole thing here.

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