Moral imbeciles in Europe

There is no political argument more disgusting, more morally inverted and more intellectually abased than the one used by the Left, the Buchananites and most media in Europe that portrays Israel as a racist, genocidalist state that is equivalent to the Nazis. This claim is so saturated with Jew-hatred, devoid of factual support or more accurately any relationship to reality, that the claimants expose their mental deficiencies and moral perversion by uttering that sort of idiocy.

This notion is a common argument point. Thus, in the UK a CONSERVATIVE member of Parliament, Sir Peter Tapsell, who served as an assistant to former PM Anthony Eden (Churchill's Foreign Secretary during WWII) in the 1955 election can rise up in debate and characterize the Israeli attacks in Lebanon as "a war crime grimly reminiscent of the Nazi atrocity on the Jewish quarter in Warsaw."

Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph, takes issue with Europe's moral idiocy:

. . . [Tapsell's] remark seems to me a symptom of a wider unreality about the Middle East, one that now dominates. It tinged the recent Commons speech by William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary. It permeates every report by the BBC.

You could criticise Israel's recent attack for many things. Some argue that it is disproportionate, or too indiscriminate. Others think that it is ill-planned militarily. Others hold that it will give more power to extremists in the Arab world, and will hamper a wider peace settlement. These are all reasonable, though not necessarily correct positions to hold. But European discourse on the subject seems to have been overwhelmed by something else - a narrative, told most powerfully by the way television pictures are selected, that makes Israel out as a senseless, imperialist, mass-murdering, racist bully.

Not only is this analysis wrong -- if the Israelis are such imperialists, why did they withdraw from Lebanon for six years, only returning when threatened once again? How many genocidal regimes do you know that have a free press and free elections? -- it is also morally imbecilic. It makes no distinction between the tough, sometimes nasty things all countries do when hard-pressed and the profoundly evil intent of some ideologies and regimes. It says nothing about the fanaticism and the immediacy of the threat to Israel. Sir Peter has somehow managed to live on this planet for 75 years without spotting the difference between what Israel is doing in Lebanon and "unlimited war".

Is it something in the European psyche or a loss of faith in the notion of right and wrong that has destroyed the moral compass in Europe?

. . . It is as if, having relinquished power, we Europeans now wish our own powerlessness upon the rest of the world. We make vaporous and offensive Nazi comparisons. We preach that unilateral action is always wrong. That position can be maintained only by people who do not have to make life-and-death decisions. It is cheap and immoral.

And historically ignorant, and divorced from reality.

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