Moral Inequivalence

From Jay Nordlinger’s Impromptus today:

Please accept my 1,024th example of Why It’s Utterly Amazing that John R. Bolton is U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Here’s an excerpt from a Q&A with the press the other day:

Reporter: And do you think the U.S. position is balanced by calling the kidnapping of the [Israeli] soldier a terrorist act while refraining from commenting on the [inaudible] civilian deaths [inaudible]?

Ambassador Bolton: There is no moral equivalency to, on the one hand, deliberate attacking of civilians, taking lives, taking hostages, versus the inadvertent and highly unfortunate civilian deaths that occur when a country exercises its right to self-defense. Those are not the same act, they are not motivated for the same reasons, they do not carry the same moral weight.

Enjoy it while you can, folks. We’ll be back to “evenhandedness” -- illogical, immoral, insupportable -- before long.

Bridget Johnson at NRO today on “It Takes One to Terrorize:”

Israel is apparently so wicked that it merited the first special session of the United Nations’ new Human Rights Council -- and we are so blessed to have Algeria, Saudi Arabia, China, Cuba, Syria, Iran, Sudan and Libya, who all participated in the Wednesday debate, spelling out human rights for us. . . .

I hate to break it to all those -- within the U.N. and without -- envisioning the Palestinian struggle to be a great stand for humanity, but the aggression is pretty one-sided. Israel does not sit around fantasizing about turning the Middle East and beyond into a Jewish theocracy. Young Israelis aren’t strapping bombs to their midsections . . . and blowing up restaurants, buses, and other gathering places for Palestinians. Israeli kids aren’t given textbooks that deny the existence of Palestinian territories and aren’t brainwashed about the glory of martyrdom.

The Orwellian Resolution No. 1 of the new U.N. Human Rights Council, adopted with the votes of the above countries, fails to mention the generally-acknowledged right of civilian populations to be free from daily rocket attacks, the mostly-recognized right of people to go to school or restaurants without fear of suicide bombers, or the (admittedly mostly-Western) right of women to work and drive and not be killed for “honor.”

Instead, the Council demands that Israel end its military operations in “Occupied Palestinian Territory” (apparently the U.N.’s designation for the place Israel withdrew from a year ago) and release all “arrested Palestinian civilians” (no need to know the charges).

But the reaction to the crisis in Gaza in Britain defies belief.