Norwegian Ethical Exceptionalism

Svein Sevje, Norway's ambassador to Israel, delivered a rather unique ethical proposition in an interview the other day.  Presumably reflecting the official position of the leftwing government in Oslo, the ambassador opined that Palestinian terror attacks against Israeli civilians were more morally justifiable than the bombing and shooting actions of Brevik a week before.

This stance makes manifest the belief within the highest circles of Norwegian politics that the throat slitting of a sleeping infant along with slightly older siblings and the parents during the hours of darkness by a group of Palestinian men was not a criminal act but rather the necessary and understandable consequence of Israel's ongoing semi-occupation of the Palestinian Authority governed West Bank.  The fact that Israel continues to dominate in most salient respects the Palestinian population of the lands taken from Jordan during the Six Day War apparently makes right any and all terrorist outrages committed against any and all Israelis.  The actions of Mr Brevik in sharp contrast cannot be justified in any way, shape, or form.

With respect to the latter contention, the Geek is complete agreement.  Considering the first proposition, the one holding Palestinian Muslim throat slitters, gunslingers, suicide bombers, and rocket firing gangs totally blameless is, in the Geek's estimate, a mind boggling exercise in cultural relativism.  Stripped to its essentials, the ambassador's remark as well as the government policy it reflects holds that there is no such critter as an absolute standard of right and wrong, moral and immoral, ethical and unethical.

This is a destructive, preposterous position which serves to undercut the norms and values which, while developed in the West over centuries of bloodshed, have become the centerpiece of such testaments to hope and aspiration as the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Before the rise of the pernicious notion of cultural relativism, the West generally held that there existed a set of ethical (or moral, should you prefer) absolutes which served to define rigidly the outer limits of acceptable individual and state conduct.  These absolutes served to progressively render the West more peaceful, more humane, more given to fairness and acceptance, more willing to negotiate, and less ready to reach for the nearest trigger.

These absolutes, primarily predicated upon Christian and Jewish concepts, made the West an evermore kind, decent, generous, and humane place.  These bright and shinning lines separating the acceptable from the unacceptable also served to make the wars of the West somewhat less brutal, somewhat less all consuming in their butchery, a bit more ready to seek the possible as opposed to the ideal outcome.

In recent years the rise of cultural relativism, the idea that no culture, no society, no system of beliefs or norms and values was in any way superior to others, has risen to grasp the elites of the West in its bony, clutching fingers.  Particularly, people of the Left have allowed themselves to be mentally and morally strangled by the notion of relativism by coming to accept the proposition that by doing so they make themselves paragons of "fairness," of "open mindedness," of "acceptance," and of "tolerance."  As the Left elite of academia, of politics, of the media have embraced relativism, these public opinion molders have sought to marginalize anyone who disagreed from the glories of relativism as "racists," or "xenophobes," even as "fascists."

To believe and argue that not all cultures, not all societies, not all belief systems, not all norms and values are equal in moral or ethical strength became politically incorrect to the highest degree.  To accept relativism was to be progressive, fair minded, and sophisticated.  The best way to parse between a member in good standing of the elite, the hoi olligoi, and a hairy palmed, knuckle dragging, slope browed denizen of the hoi polloi was on the basis of acceptance or rejection of cultural relativism.

Norwegians, particularly those on the Left and in the elite of politics, media, and academia have prided themselves and their country on its open minded, fair, and tolerant acceptance of those different from themselves.  That is, of course, laudable--up to a point.  The point comes when recurrent acts of terror including those of the most bestial sort are excused as the legitimate response to "illegal" military occupation.  That point comes when acts of equal barbarity are assessed as morally different with one justified by purely contextual matters including cultural differences.

It is ironic in the extreme that the Norsk ambassador by his words reinforced one of the main points made at great and repetitive length in Brevik's manifesto--the pernicious pervasiveness of cultural relativism in Norway and Europe generally along with the lethal effects of this belief on political and social structures.  Mr Sveje and the government which issued his credentials just don't get it.  Neither, one might surmise, do a large number of Norwegians--and Europeans as well as Americans.

The "it" that Sveje and others don't get is simply that both history and contemporary affairs demonstrates clearly that some cultures, some societies, some norms and values, some belief systems, some governmental systems are better, more ethical, more moral, if you prefer, than others.  In this context, it is clear that the West is superior in all ethical respects to the Muslim states.  The West has gone through a very, very long learning curve of blood, destruction, mass death, suffering on a cosmic scale, and has come out purified in many essential respects.  At the same time, the West is aware of its ongoing imperfections and continues to seek to rectify them.

The West may not have been blameless. But, in comparison to Muslim states and societies, it is not blameworthy today.  And, in this connection Israel must be considered to be part of the West.

Consider the reaction throughout the West to Brevik's one man massacre.  Universal condemnation even from those who share the fears of "Islamification" expressed by the terrorist murderer.  Christian entities and clerics have been monolithic in their denunciation of Brevik's actions.

In sharp contrast Osama bin Laden remains a celebrated hero in Muslim societies and states.  So do his emulators, his subordinates, his followers, and successors.

Consider Somalia.  Thousands starve.  Tens of thousands flee starvation.  The Muslim group, al-Shabaab, prevents famine relief while engaging in an orgy of religiously predicated violence.  The Organization of Islamic Cooperation sits back with folded hands and indifferent expressions watching the famine do its deadly work apparently convinced that starvation on this cosmic scale is the will of the deity such that any relief effort would be blasphemy at best, apostasy at worst.

At the same time it is the West which seeks to provide succor to the displaced and dying Somalis.  It is the West which provides food and money, management expertise and aircraft, trying desperately to save lives written off by al-Shabaab and the OIC.

Consider Israel.  While there are Israelis both in and out of government who are intransigent in the extreme, there is also a large, vibrant contingent of civil society and religiously motivated Israelis seeking peace, willing to see Palestine come into full, free existence.  At the same time, the Palestinians are unwilling to grant Israel's right to exist (Hamas) or unwilling to acknowledge the realty that Israel is a Jewish state (Fatah.)  The historical record demonstrates clearly that the "sins" of the Israelis are far outnumbered by those of the Palestinians--going back over eighty years.

Consider terrorism around the globe.  How often does one read of radical extremist Buddhists taking hostages or detonating suicide vests?  How many violent political Hindus fly aircraft into civilian structures shouting praise to one or another of their pantheon?  Are Catholics, or Lutherans noted for their commitment to "martyrdom operations?"  The use of terror attacks, of IEDs, of suicide bombings is almost exclusively the dominion of Muslims in service to what they perceive as their duty to their almighty.

No, Mr Ambassador, you are wrong.  Dangerously wrong.  Your attitude and that of your government and the Norwegian elite behind that government are sabotaging all that makes the West what it is.  You, with your dedication to the specious and historically unjustified notion of cultural relativism, are attacking all which has been learned over a score of deadly, bloody centuries by the West and which makes the West today the last best hope of humanity.

Murder is wrong.  Period.  Terror, which is to say, murder for a political goal, is wrong.  Period.  The Arab Muslim slitting the Jewish infant's throat is equal in evil to Brevik with his bomb and gun.  Period.  Get a grip on it, Svein.

Christian(?) Terrorism and Cultural Relativism

Reading the manifesto of Anders Behring Brevik is a bit of a trudge, a long yomp uphill with wind and a cold rain in your face--and mud sucking at your boots.  But, it is worth it.  More than, say, the Unibomber's treatise on the ills of technology, the Norwegian's great effort, "2083: A European Declaration of Independence" provides real insight into a warped mind.  In this it is not unlike reading Osama bin Laden's "declaration of war" against the US some fifteen years ago.

This is an appropriate analogy as Mr Berserker Brevik is a mirror image of the assorted practitioners of violent political Islam.  Brevik, like bin Laden, made a list of quite valid objections to key aspects of contemporary life in the areas of the world in which each lived.  Bin Landen's negative views of US policy to (and presence in) the Mideast were neither lunatic nor trivial.  Brevik's critique of both multiculturalism and the impact of assimilation resistant Muslim immigrants upon Western Europe are also neither lunatic nor trivial.

The objective, intellectual predicates of bin Laden and Brevik were unobjectionable.  Neither was over the edge in their thinking in and of itself.  Where each went over the edge was in the manner by which they made their thoughts manifest.  It was in the reliance upon lethal violence as the only way of obtaining redress for unacceptable conditions that the two men--one a Muslim with Salifist roots and the other a "fundamentalist" Christian (whatever the word "fundamentalist" might mean in this specific case)--became brothers in spirit.

The spiritual kinship between Brevik and his Muslim opponents carries a risk for all of us in the West which needs both recognition and effective addressing.  The public opinion molding "elites" of Western academia, journalism, and politics, as well as many of us in the non-elite are damned currently with an overabundance of fairmindedness, openmindedness, tolerance, and a desire to accept the other which is evident only in its absence within the ranks of those who subscribe to political Islam.

This tendency, which is both a source of strength and weakness within the West, is already evident.  The NYT has set its sights on those who have written and spoken negatively regarding Islam--particularly those cited and quoted in "2083."  There can be little doubt but other individuals and organs will take the same censorious path.

This is as wrong as a soup sandwich--and as dangerous as tossing sweating dynamite against a stone wall.  Any effort to suppress open and critical assessment of negative aspects of Islam such as the myriad contained in political Islam, particularly the form which admires and employs violence in pursuit of its goals, simply because as one person quoted by the NYT put it, "words have consequences," is both anathema to the ideals of the US and other Western states but dangerously counterproductive.  Regardless of individuals such as the apparently delusional Brevik, there is a crying need to expose the dark underside of Islam.

Had Brevik been a Muslim, his actions would be applauded by many around the majority Muslim countries--and within the self-segregating Muslim enclaves dotting the European landscape from Norway to the UK to France, Germany, and beyond.  But, Brevik was purportedly a Christian, and thus his actions receive only the condemnation they deserve from Christians around the world.

In this there resides the most significant distinction between the two religions.  Islam celebrates violence undertaken in either the defense or the expansion of the faith.  Christianity denounces violence.  Regardless of the many, many times that Christians have violated their faith, the reality remains unchanged--Jesus was not the Man of the Sword (or the bomb or the semi-automatic rifle.)  There is no faith rooted excuse or reason for offensive violence.  There can be and is no greater difference between the two largest monotheistic religions than that.

Whether the people and opinion molders of the West like the idea or not, there is and will be for some while to come a struggle between the advocates of violent political Islam and the civilized states.  As part of this struggle there will be ongoing attempts to use the openmindedness, the tolerance, the desire to be fair which characterizes the West against it.  The only defenses against this are understanding of the nature and motives of the adversary and a willingness to reject the pernicious concept of cultural relativism.

Cultural relativism hides behind the bland and "fair" term of multiculturalism.  This doctrine holds that no society, no polity, no culture is inherently "better" or "superior" to any other.  Cultural relativism holds that it is impossible to have absolute standards regarding human behavior, that all standards can be applied only within specific cultural contexts, preferably only by individuals living within the context.

This idea is, of course, utter bilge.  The Christians who condemn the acts of their fellow, Brevik, show this.  So do the Norwegians who make no excuses for their fellow countryman.  In this affirmation of condemnation there is a recognition of a universal principle--murder most foul is just that, murder most foul.  It cannot be excused nor justified by even very legitimate concerns.  There is no excuse.

It is the willingness to condemn Brevik which gives the West the right to condemn the actions of his spirit brothers of al-Qaeda or Taliban.  Murder most foul is murder most foul.  No excuses.  No moral justification.  No resorting to theological spinning and weaving.

In sharp contrast, Muslims of the Mideast and Northwest Asia have been willing to pile vitrupitation upon vitriol in their consideration both of Brevik and the early speculation that a Muslim group might have been behind the atrocities.  At the same time, there is not and never has been the slightest rejection of the murder most foul committed by Muslims in the name of the Prophet and faith.

In this difference resides the justification for not censoring criticism of Islam.  In this difference resides the need to continue critiquing that which deserves it within Muslim ranks.  Brevik is an anomaly and has been cast out as such both in Norway and throughout the West.  In the lands of Islam, however, Brevik's spirit brother, Osama bin Laden, remains a hero, a model, a zenith to which all too many aspire.

Consider that difference and ask yourself, "Are all cultures really equal?"