If any Americans remained unconvinced that barbaric evil is at the
cold-blooded heart of the terrorist
group ISIS, their recent
beheading of journalist James Foley made it graphically undeniable. The moral
divide between ISIS and us is clearly marked. And yet there are those among us
who still cannot bring themselves to use moral terminology to describe the
enemy.
Michael J. Boyle for example, an
associate professor of political science at La Salle University, contributed an
op-ed to the New
York Times Saturday on “the
moral hazard” of using terms like “evil” and “cancer” to describe the terrorist
group ISIS. Sure, he concedes, ISIS has committed thousands of
gruesome human rights violations and war crimes, but Boyle wants to put the brakes on the “disturbing return of the
moralistic language once used to describe Al Qaeda.”
“Condemning the black-clad, masked militants as purely ‘evil,’” he
writes, “is seductive, for it conveys a moral clarity and separates ourselves
and our tactics from the enemy and theirs.” How is this a problem? Moral
clarity is an ideal state of affairs, especially in a world in which moral boundaries
so frequently seem blurred. But Boyle believes that using judgments such as
“nihilistic” to describe a group “tends to obscure the group’s strategic aims
and preclude further analysis.” In other words, it discourages us from
understanding the enemy.
I’m skeptical that Boyle himself understands ISIS’ strategic aims. He
insists that ISIS “operates less like a revolutionary terrorist movement that
wants to overturn the entire political order in the Middle East than a
successful insurgent group that wants a seat at that table.” The notion that
Islamic fundamentalists want only a seat at the political table is short-sighted,
if not deluded. ISIS and their brethren absolutely
want to overturn the political order of the world, not just the Middle East,
and replace it with their own. This may seem comically unrealistic to us, but our
opinion is irrelevant; all that matters is, ISIS
believes it to be not only possible, but inevitable. They are executing their
vision in a bloody swath across Iraq, and will continue until someone with the
moral clarity and military power to stop them does so.
But this is another issue for Boyle. He is concerned that moralizing
about the enemy is a slippery slope toward another Middle Eastern military
quagmire:
The Obama administration needs to ensure that
the just revulsion over Mr. Foley’s murder and ISIS’ other abuses does not lead
us down an unplanned path toward open-ended conflict… The strategic drift
produced by this moralistic language is already noticeable, as an air campaign
first designed to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe has morphed into an effort
to roll back, or even defeat, ISIS.
Isn’t rolling back and defeating ISIS a desirable outcome? In any case, whether
we acknowledge it or not, we already are in an open-ended conflict with an
enemy – Islamic fundamentalists – who are committed to a forever war. The way
to prevent a quagmire is not to be tentative about military force, but to unleash
hell and finish the job.
The New York Times wasn’t alone in its
moral unease. A similar piece, “Should We Call
ISIS ‘Evil,’” appeared on CNN, as National Review Online’s Jonah Goldberg pointed out. James Dawes,
director of the Program in Human Rights at Macalester College in St. Paul,
Minnesota, wagged his finger at Goldberg for tweeting that ISIS is obviously
evil, and for the same reason as the Times’ Boyle: such simplistic
terminology doesn’t do justice to the “complexities” of the ISIS phenomenon.
Dawes too claims that calling someone evil “stops us from thinking”:
If we are to have any hope of preventing the
spread of extremist ideologies, we must do more than bomb the believers. We
must understand them. We must be willing to continue thinking...
We can say they are evil people doing evil
things for evil ends. Or we can do the hard work of understanding the context
that made them, so that we can create a context that unmakes them.
Inexplicably, Dawes seems to believe that understanding our enemies and identifying them as evil are
mutually exclusive. Then he goes from
the inexplicable to the offensive: “There is only one good reason to denounce a
group as evil – because you plan to injure them, and calling them evil makes it
psychologically easier to do so. ‘Evil’ is the most powerful word we have to
prepare ourselves to kill other people comfortably.”
What a crock of academic moral equivalence.
The reality is that we call ISIS evil not so Americans can have an expedient justification
to go out and “kill other people comfortably,” but because ISIS beheads innocents,
buries children alive, sells women into slavery, and massacres thousands. If we
can’t objectively describe that as evil, then evil doesn’t exist. Perhaps for
Dawes, it doesn’t.
There is no question that understanding the enemy is always vital. No one
argues otherwise. But moral judgment is vital too. However, since 9/11 (and
even before), the news media, academia, politicians, and even our own military
establishment have done their best to deflect understanding and judgment of Islam and to explain
away the evil done in its name as everything but Islamic. Islam is peace, they say. Jihad isn’t holy war, it’s
inner struggle. Terrorism is blowback for our own oil-grubbing imperialism. The
Ft. Hood massacre was workplace violence. Al Qaeda has hijacked and perverted
Islam. Hamas are freedom fighters pushing back against Israeli occupation. ISIS
is just an insurgent group seeking political legitimacy. And so on.
We will begin to win this forever war when remove these politically
correct obstacles to understanding the enemy, and embrace the moral clarity to identify
evil and eradicate it.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 8/27/14)
