In a New York Times editorial entitled “Condemnation without Absolutes” (10/15) Stanley Fish of the University of Illinois maintains “there can be no independent standard for determining which of many rival interpretations of an event is the true one.” What he is saying, in his sophistic intellectual style, is that there is no such thing as absolute morality, only a morality shaped by “interpreters” of an event. Tell that to the families of the 5,000 human beings lying under the rubble of the twin towers. They don’t need to interpret the morality of an event, it stares them in the face every morning when their loved one doesn’t come down for breakfast.
Fish maintains that what “postmodern thought,” a euphemism for neo-Marxist thought, “argues against is the hope of justifying our response to the attacks in universal terms that would be persuasive to everyone, including our enemies.” What he’s saying is that we have no right to identify evil because someone else might not agree with us. This has always been quite convenient for the left given the fact that, in the name of absolute morality as they define it, they have been, according to the Black Book of Communism, responsible for the liquidation of over 100 million people in the twentieth century.
Fish states “Invoking the abstract notions of justice and truth to support our cause wouldn’t be effective anyway because our adversaries lay claim to the same language.” He’s right, of course, about our adversaries. Hitler recorded in his diary, a week before he committed suicide, that his treatment of the Jews of Europe was “humane” and his greatest accomplishment. Stalin justified the show trials of the 1930’s by referring to the victims as “enemies of the people” and “social misfits.” Eldridge Cleaver stated that the rape of white women was a justifiable political statement.
Fish explains that our adversaries are driven by “reasons and motives and even..a perverted vision of some virtues.” He contradicts himself when he casts absolute moral judgment with his use of the term “perverted.” More troubling, he implicitly justifies their actions by explaining that “reasons and motives” in and of themselves justify action regardless of what those reasons and motives may be. This is what he describes as a “rival interpretation of an event.” The criminals and their apologists make no such prevarications; they state their motives clearly. They justify their act of mass murder as part of a Jihad against the non-Muslim American great Satan.
Fish takes umbrage over the use of the term “terrorism.” He states that the term “is the name of a style of warfare” without identifying the nature of that “style.” Terrorism is the targeting of innocent people for murder as a military strategy. When the suicide bomber blew himself up at the pizza parlor in Jerusalem his goal was to kill innocent people; hence, he committed an act of terror. When Israel retaliated by killing the mastermind behind this act they engaged in a legitimate military act of self-defense. The attack on the twin towers was an act of terror. The military action against the nation that shelters the attackers is a legitimate and necessary act of self-defense. One action is right, the other action is wrong.
Fish has this demented idea that by judging the perpetrators of the twin tower bombing as absolutely evil we are somehow prevented from understanding their beliefs and motives. Quite the opposite is true. It is critical that we understand the evil that confronts us, in all of its complexities, in order to combat it. It is critical that as individuals, and as a nation, we constantly identify those forces that seek to deprive us of our freedom.