Julia Gorin at Political Mavens details a particularly jaw-dropping case of moral equivalence.
I had to do a double take when I read these opening paragraphs in Saturday’s Salt Lake Tribune:Holocaust survivor mesmerizes studentsHe was just a little older than his audience when the Nazis starved him and showed him such unspeakable brutality. He’s still talking about it now.
The reaction at Fort Herriman Middle School last week was to stand and cheer his courage. Days after a teenager went on a shooting rampage in Salt Lake City, students at Jordan School District middle schools were mesmerized by David Faber, a Holocaust survivor who weighed 72 pounds when he was freed from a concentration camp at 18. He was the same age as Sulejman Talovic, the Trolley Square shooter.
What was that? Come again? Where did that line come from? What is it doing there? What is its meaning? It appears that the Salt Lake Tribune has made it official: A Killer Muslim is no worse than a Jewish survivor. Said differently: a Jewish survivor is as bad as a Muslim killer. Said another way: A Jew who wasn’t killed is as bad as a Muslim who has killed.
The author doesn’t even make a bland comparison of this victim of an atrocity to the victims of the killer. No, she compares a Jew who survived death to a Muslim who caused it. She is equating a villain with a victim, with someone who actually witnessed the Holocaust and didn’t go about killing people later as a result, to someone who left an enclave — which was not a labor or death camp — before any killing of its inhabitants took place. She’s comparing someone guilty of the kind of genocidal behavior and religious persecution that the other person was a victim of.
But the dumbness doesn’t stop there. She also bases the comparison on age similarities, but there isn’t even enough for that. She compares the survivor’s age at rescue to the killer’s age at killing, which gives the whole thing even less sense, if possible, since Talovic left Srebrenica when he was four.
Read it all.
Robert,
Couldn't she have been drawing a comparison between a Jew and a Muslim and their respective behavior?
Rule one of why we lose
Why we lose.
• Insistence that all religions are equally benevolent or equally malevolent. Creating convoluted arguments that try to equate wrongs committed when failure to adhere to doctrine with wrongs sanctified by scripture
• Refusal to accept a standard main stream interpretation of Islamic scripture always results in murder of non muslims.
• Insisting that there is a sect of Islam that is accepting of infidels kafirs and shirk .Acceptance of proclamations about the tolerance & plurality of Islam now and in history in spite of the facts and lack of proof and the direct contradictions of those traits in Islamic scripture
• Insist that “Islamic reformers” and “Mythical Moderate Muslims” have a different goal than mujahadeen with a bomb, rather than explore Islamic scripture and realize that they are human shields buying time for the jihad killers to put their pieces in place.
• To much imagination, we think we can drop spies behind enemy lines and foment discord and gain support for a western causes and at another time and place that may have been true. But with Islam and muslims we in the west will always be betrayed.
• Failure to recognize Islamic hate speech law suits, Islamic bias laws suits, Islamic offended law suits, etcetera . Failure to recognize youthful unrest in France, separatists violence in Thailand similar global Islamic events or “Islamic unrest” as “Jihad” ,
• Blackmail jihad
• Financial jihad
• Intellectual jihad
• Intimidation jihad
• Evangelical jihad
• Inspirational jihad
• Political jihad .
• Failure to name the enemy .Islam
I followed the links and read the original article. I don't see any sign of moral equivalence here. In fact, if I wanted to read something into it, I would read that the writer was contrasting the Jew and the Moslem to the latter's detriment, but had to tiptoe around Moslem thing, leaving the sentences open to misinterpretation.
But I just don't see any hint of moral equivalence here.
From the original posting about this at politicalmavens.com, the letter Ms Gorin sent to the author:
Ms Lyon replied that it was the latter, both men had seen horrors. So although this is not a clearcut case of trying to create moral equivalence it is still a grotesque equation of human experience. I think a well-penned letter along the lines of Ms. Gorin's first point might help readers (and Ms Lyon) to draw a better conclusion:
Terrorist acts are not caused by experiencing emotional trauma, personal or collective injustice, or an unfriendly environment -- they are personal choices. I'm personally sick of a culture that spins monsters into victims, treats them more sympathetically sometimes than their own victims.
Perhaps these two young men SHOULD be held up side by side. Both witnessed horrific things in their childhood. One lived through it and turned that great evil around, devoting his life to making the world a better place, in the hope that such abominations never happen again. The other lived through it and harbored the hatred and pain, nursing it until it drove him to make his own corner of the world a worse place, and ensuring, to the best of his ability, that others face a similar abomination to the one of his childhood experience.
There's a lesson in there somewhere... Ms Rogin, you articulate it so much better than me, how about seeing if they'll publish the correct "conclusion to the story", as your letter to Ms Lyon suggested. Turn that grotesque superposition into the excellent moral lesson it should contain.
Mr.Gorins sensitivities are bit heightened and understandibly so.
The the author of the Salt Lake Tribune Article comes off as having been so removed from the horrors of the genocide in Nazi Germany over 62 years ago that she treated these comparisons with a almost whimsical lightness. I would agree that putting in the comparison was a foolish error in judgement and a demonstration of just plain light headed dumbness.
I followed Ms. Gorin's advice to "read it all." After doing so, my main conclusion is that she needs to chill.
While "moral equivalence" is one possible explanation of the bizarre sentence in the Salt Lake Tribune article, it's far from the only one. After reading the Salt Lake Tribune article, I find it hard to figure out what the heck the author meant to imply, but I was pretty sure that moral equivalence wasn't it. I figured it was probably something along the lines of that "both men had seen horrors," yet Faber managed to refrain from going on a killing spree. I understand from the comments above that this, in fact, was the author's point. Still, unless she was going to explain that, she would have been better advised to leave the sentence out. But by the same token, Gorin should have investigated the matter more thoroughly before bluntly accusing the Tribune of considering (or even of "appear[ing]" to consider) "a Killer Muslim . . . no worse than a Jewish survivor." That kind of jumping to conclusions is what we papists call "rash judgment."
its hard to say, since we only have an excert from the original Tribune article by Lyon.
That being said, it still is negigent on the part of Lyon, not to be explicit in the meaning behind the comparison of the two, a poor comparison at best, and downright reprehensible if it was intended as a typical apologist defense of the Muslim killer.
Oops, just read the whole Tribune article. A terrible comparison by Lyon, not relevant to the story at all and for the lack of clarification of the comparison on the part of the author, should be scrutinized.
This piece truly is a jewel. Not in a positive way of course, but it is almost a historical document. When the time is right to change the HQ of the European Union into a museum of dhimmithude and leftist shortsightedness, this piece needs a special hall-of-shame corner on the American way of moral equivalence.
Julia Gorin has done some sterling work, exposing the crass reporting of the Salt Lake Jihadi. What's really jaw dropping is, as noted, the horrific PC moral equivalency on show in the MSN.
And how much do you want to bet that in a couple of years the situation will have gotten a whole lot worse.
The MSN's mantra is "anyone who, directly or indirectly, fought the Serbs, is a victim. Their status comparable with Holocaust survivors"
DrWolffenstein: It is indeed a jewel.
DrWolffenstein: It is indeed a jewel.
Ms. Lyons demonstrates her complete moral stuntedness by making Mr. Faber and Sulejman Talovic equivilant in any way, shape or form. Ms. Gorin was quite right to call her on it ... and the stupid couldn't come up with a full sentence to explain her stupidity.
She also wrote this stupid thing: "He was just a little older than his audience when the Nazis starved him and showed him such unspeakable brutality. He’s still talking about it now."
He's still talking about it now? With that, Ms. Lyons seems to equate Mr. Farber w/some old bore talking about his glory days of bowling. Bad writing fueled by moral make nice dumbness.
Seamus,
The kind of reading you did of that awful article is what this papist calls 'mind reading' or 'divination' .. something I don't want to be involved in when reading a newspaper article. Ms. Lyons attempted to make Mr. Farber and Mr. Talovic equivalent but they are not equivalent. Among other things, one is a survivor of mass murder and the other was a mass murderer. Big Difference.
The kind of reading you did of that awful article is what this papist calls 'mind reading' or 'divination' .. something I don't want to be involved in when reading a newspaper article.
No, the only mind-reading was by Ms. Gorin. I specifically reserved judgment on what on earth Ms. Lyon was trying to say. Ms. Gorin, though, exercised no such restratin, and apparently believed that if the words *could* be a manifestation of moral equivalence, they *were* a manifestation of moral equivalence, and should be denounced as such.