Daniel Henninger, writing in the Wall Street Journal’s free OpinionJournal section, looks at America’s view on the Middle East, and likes what he sees. The article’s subhead sums it all up: “On the Mideast, America is right and the rest of the world is wrong”:
Sitting home at night, watching the news on U.S. television or C-SPAN’s airing of the BBC, Americans who hold these views of the events in Israel must wonder if they’re living in some alternative reality. This past week, amid the constant images of Jenin’s rubble and elderly men and wailing women in scarves, came word that Amnesty International, the Red Cross and an arm of the U.N. were accusing the Israelis of “human rights abuses.” The U.N. Security Council put through an Arab-sponsored resolution to investigate the fighting in Jenin, a place that in fact has been the West Bank’s version of the Star Wars bar, the primary haunt and collection point for the most extreme Palestinian gunmen and suicide planners.
In the otherwordly moral calculus of post World War II Europe and much media–which these polls suggest is beyond the ken of most Americans–self-evident atrocities such as the Passover suicide bombing are mere stories in the wreckage of the news. But a military counter-strike is a human rights abuse. We have arrived at a point in international affairs at which the degraded concept of moral equivalence would be a step toward the sunshine.
It may well be true that Americans born after World War II lost their innocence about the world on September 11, but how fortunate that when this nation is attacked and finds itself in a long, grim war with an enemy dedicated to killing civilians, its people are not so easily diverted by the kind of casuistry, salami-slicing, needle-dancing, opportunism and moral myopia that has gripped the world’s opinion-shaping institutions.
(Found via VodkaPundit.)
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