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paft.livejournal.comThane Rosenbaum opens his Wall Street Journal editorial with the obligatory moue of regret: “Let’s state the obvious: Nobody likes to see dead children.”
These are what I call “magic words,” that is, words that are intended to magically render the indefensible and immoral somehow defensible and moral. Whenever you read or see this oh-so-regretful face pulled near the beginning of an editorial, you know it’s going to be followed by the hardening of the jaw and narrowing of the eyes meant to indicate the writer isn’t allowing any namby-pamby sentimentality about children, little old ladies and baby seals to get into the way of his clear-eyed understanding of What Needs to be Done.
Rosenbaum goes on to say that
On some basic level, you forfeit your right to be called civilians when you freely elect members of a terrorist organization as statesmen, invite them to dinner with blood on their hands and allow them to set up shop in your living room as their base of operations. At that point you begin to look a lot more like conscripted soldiers than innocent civilians. And you have wittingly made yourself targets.
Other writers have pointed out the obvious parallel to Osama Bin Laden’s 2002 justification for targeting American civilians:
Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple... the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies... This is why the American people cannot be not innocent of all the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against us. Allah, the Almighty, legislated the permission and the option to take revenge.
I have a dream: I have a dream that someday, somehow, we will all understand that not applying human rights to peoples we hate renders the term “human rights” meaningless.
These are what I call “magic words,” that is, words that are intended to magically render the indefensible and immoral somehow defensible and moral. Whenever you read or see this oh-so-regretful face pulled near the beginning of an editorial, you know it’s going to be followed by the hardening of the jaw and narrowing of the eyes meant to indicate the writer isn’t allowing any namby-pamby sentimentality about children, little old ladies and baby seals to get into the way of his clear-eyed understanding of What Needs to be Done.
Rosenbaum goes on to say that
On some basic level, you forfeit your right to be called civilians when you freely elect members of a terrorist organization as statesmen, invite them to dinner with blood on their hands and allow them to set up shop in your living room as their base of operations. At that point you begin to look a lot more like conscripted soldiers than innocent civilians. And you have wittingly made yourself targets.
Other writers have pointed out the obvious parallel to Osama Bin Laden’s 2002 justification for targeting American civilians:
Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple... the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies... This is why the American people cannot be not innocent of all the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against us. Allah, the Almighty, legislated the permission and the option to take revenge.
I have a dream: I have a dream that someday, somehow, we will all understand that not applying human rights to peoples we hate renders the term “human rights” meaningless.
