Judea Pearl: Why can’t elites call evil for what it is?

Just got done reading a powerful piece opinion piece (h/t: Dan Collins) in the Wall Street Journal written by Judea Pearl, the father of murdered WSJ reporter Daniel Pearl. Pearl is a professor at UCLA and has seen first hand how terrorist apologists on liberal college campuses can turn “a symposium […] on human rights” into a “Hamas recruitment rally.” He also calls out other elites in the media and elsewhere for their failure to call terrorism for what it is and who instead engage in a “normalizing” of evil that is both repugnant and frightening.

I commend Mr. Pearl for writing this in the era of the waning of the phrase “war on terror,” a waning that started when Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee nearly two years ago eliminated the phrase from use when debating and crafting bills related to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other war on terror efforts both at home and abroad. Some would argue that it’s just a matter of “semantics.” It is not, not when you have moral relativists out there – many of them in the Democratic party – who decry the use of words like “Islamofascism” because they feel it’s “insulting” to all who worship Islam, and goodness knows we wouldn’t want to offend anyone other than Christians and Republicans, right?

When you lose the ability and the willingness to call wrong and evil for what they are, you lose a little bit of your soul in the process. The people who yell the loudest when phrases like “Axis of Evil” and “Evil Empire” are used are the same people who have no trouble whatsoever using actual derogatory terms in turn for the opposition party here in this country. Islamofascists are not “evil” to these people, they are “misunderstood” (we heard this before as it related to Communism as well). On the other hand, those who want to fight back hard against terrorism – including our fine men and women in the military – are the ones who are the “real problem.” Those people supposedly “hate” Muslims, some of them are “no better” than Pol Pot, etc. You get the picture. In a nutshell, elites view America as the problem, not the solution.

This is why it was important for President Obama (who Pearl did not mention in his piece) to separate himself from those in his party who feel it’s necessary to “apologize” for all the “wrong” this country has supposedly done against Muslims over the last 20-30 years. It’s one thing to want to engage in Muslim outreach, but it’s another thing to throw your predecessor and his efforts under the bus, as well as completely rewrite 30 years of history as it relates to US/Muslim nation relations, painting the US as the aggressor. Unfortunately, Barack Obama failed in this endeavor by going into his interview with Al Arabiya not painting America as a force of good in the world but instead as a force that should be ‘contained’ and ‘restrained,’ and one that had done ‘much wrong’ to Muslims over the last 20-30 years – and he said it all in an effort to “relate” to the Muslim world.

Islamofascism is evil. America is a source for good in this world. All too many liberals are unwilling to say that and mean it. The blood of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers has been shed in the name of peace, security, stability, and democracy in many countries across the world … including some Arab nations. Our President – the Commander in Chief, the man charged with protecting this country from terrorism and the man who by the nature of his election is supposed to represent the goodness of America to the world, needs to understand that and emphasize it, not apologize for it. America can show that it can be conciliatory with other nations without having to acknowledge negative perceptions held about this country that in reality are far off the mark from what this country is and has always been about.

Maybe one day, our President will be the one prominent liberal (and the most important one, at that) to understand that.

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