Moral Relativism, from O.J. to the Arab-Israeli Conflict

This exercise in moral equivalence helped create the unseemly spectacle in which many blacks across the country cheered Simpson's acquittal because he shared the color of their skin, while whites looked on in stunned silence. In a further gesture of moral equivalence, the media reported this as a sign of a "divide" in our country between the "perspectives" of blacks and whites. But in the end, the truth was still the truth: the shining athlete appeared to be a brutal murderer whose lawyers had mendaciously used his race to help him escape punishment, and those who cheered him had been encouraged to cheer nothing less than the triumph of evil.

A similar relativistic dynamic has operated in the Arab-Israeli struggle. That conflict could have been settled years ago if the world community had insisted that the Arabs accept the UN-approved partition of Palestine. Had they done so, the refugees from the 1948 war could have been decently resettled in a Palestinian state on the West Bank and the Palestinians could gradually have grown toward dignified self-government. While this course of action would have been painful for them at first, it was the best possible choice in the real world. Israel had become a fact of life in 1948. Letting the Arabs deny that reality and creating a false equivalence between Israel's right to exist and the Arabs' demand for "justice," which actually entailed the elimination of the Jewish state, only sparked the horrors of the ensuing decades.

World opinion underwrote further horrors when it encouraged the Palestinians in the fantasy that they could get back what they had lost through their bad choices and aggressive acts in the decades since 1948. Most recently, their refusal to make any counteroffer to Barak's generous proposals at Camp David, and their decision to launch the most barbaric violence in Mideast history, revealed more clearly than ever that their intention is not to share the Holy Land with the Jews but to destroy Israel altogether. Yet media coverage still tends to treat both sides as being equally at fault in the "cycle of violence."

Affecting a pose of "neutrality" and "balance" between irreconcilable points of view, Westerners imagine that they are scaling the heights of fairness and compassion, when in fact they are abrogating the moral duty to discriminate between the better and the worse case. The refusal to choose between truth and lies, between relative degrees of good and evil, only permits lies and evil to prosper.

By contrast, as we have seen in Afghanistan, a forceful stand for the right can weaken and prevent evil. In a recent article in The New Yorker, Mideast scholar Bernard Lewis reports that the rioters who captured the U.S. embassy staff in Teheran in 1979 intended to hold the Americans for only a few days. But in the absence of any forceful response from the Carter White House, the Iranians changed their minds and turned an otherwise passing flare-up into a hostage nightmare that lasted 444 days.

Likewise, when the civilized world fails to condemn Palestinian terrorists and treats their mass murders of Israeli citizens as the moral equivalent of Israeli self-defense, the terrorists are encouraged to further acts of mass murder. Even now, despite the Palestinians' ongoing atrocities, the world still prompts them to perceive themselves as victims instead of as moral agents who are creating their own hell by their own actions. Even now, well-meaning Westerners blandly speak of yet another return to the "peace" table, as if the idea of peace weren't at this point as irrevocably shredded as the bodies of the terrorists' victims. Lewis remarks that Arabs increasingly complain of how the United States holds them to lower standards than are expected of Westerners. It is not surprising, then, that many continue to behave according to those low standards.

In the end, once again, the truth is the truth. Reality exists, regardless of one's "perspective." While Israel certainly is wounded by the violence of recent months, the people most hurt in the Mideast impasse have been the Palestinians themselves, who seem to be caught in one of the circles of the Inferno. Their chances for statehood lost, their voices of moderation and true leadership silenced by terror and intimidation, themselves sunk in a mire of hatred and fury, they raise their little sons to become suicide bombers.