Asymmetric Warfare

Victor Davis Hanson last week wrote about an amoral west being unable to make moral judgments. Richard Fernandez The Belmont Club: The Sling and the Stone wrote:

Byrne's horror at Jesus Camp perfectly illustrated what Mark Steyn called the single greatest weakness of Western culture: its ability to draw a moral equivalence between anything and everything; between a terrorist camp with explosives and machineguns and a summer camp in North Dakota. It is really an inability to see anything in due proportion. Kofi Annan's assertion of "disproportionate response" by Israel against Hezbollah really makes no sense in world where an equivalence operator can be inserted between any two operands of whatever value. And the consequence of the fallen calculus of international relations is the tactical and strategic equivalence between a democratic state and terrorist non-state; the parity between barbarism and civilization.

Moral equivalency may be one of the most important factors inhibiting the near term prosecution of a “war” against a waxing Islam. Unfortunately, warnings about the deleterious effects of western liberalism have gone unheeded by the elites while Islamists are exploiting the liberal myopia in an asymmetric public relations campaign and war against modernity.

For liberal western media, smart bombs and technology bind the west to higher moral standards with more accountability for civilian deaths. As punishment is mitigated by lower IQ’s, dysfunctional childhoods and victim status, allowances are made for those who use crude weapons such as car bombs, ied’s, and katusha rockets. Islam skillfully takes advantage of a post-modern west which resorts to moral equivalence and excuses to justify decadent and perverse behavior.

Arafat and company perfected the underdog role of “Zionist victim.” Like the Irish Republican Army politicians claimed no control over their military wing, President Arafat claimed that he had no control over the myriad militant forces which he had either created or allowed to form. New actors continue the roles in Gaza and Lebanon. The political wing of Hamas claims that it has no control of its military wing. The government of Lebanon claims to have no control of Hesbollah. It is in this manner that militant Islam operates while the governments claim deniability and the politically correct feminized west obsesses on the Arab victims of Israel or the US.

There are encouraging signs that some in the western media have begun to recognize the Islamists’ tactics but most are loathe to admit that they are themselves victims of a humanist trap.