"Good vs. Evil" on 9/11 [Updated]

WTC aftermath. Photo embedded from Global Security.org

I just realized why I bother reading Andrew Sullivan's site. He provides so much material that it's like shooting fish in a barrel.

Sullivan doesn't allow comments on his site, but every once in a while he pulls out a selected email to post on his front page, without commenting on it. That way, he can promote the most ridiculous statements, while retaining the option of the "plausible deniability" defense if it gets bad publicity. He can simply say:"I didn't write it, after all..."

This letter from yesterday is a classic:

Your comment about Bush trying to frame the Iraq war as a simple battle between "Good" and "Evil" reminds me of my one 9/11 joke. I know it's wrong, insensitive, and politically incorrect to have a 9/11 joke, but since I don’t have a TV show to lose (and it speaks to your point), here it is.

On 9/11 my youngest son was 5 years old. The attack was mentioned in his school, and he saw some of the story on TV when my wife and I were watching. Being curious, he asked why people would do such a thing. We always try to be as honest as we can with our children, while keeping in mind their intellectual and developmental limits. So we told him that there were some bad people who don't like America and they did this bad thing because they wanted to hurt us. That seemed to satisfy his curiosity at the time, but I felt very conflicted with what I had said. I didn't like that I'd resorted to overly general categories like bad people or that I felt I had to completely skip over some of the rationale for anti-American sentiment, even though I believe some of it is justified [emphasis mine]. I just wondered if I had done him a disservice by glossing over it so superficially. But then a couple days later, Bush finally addressed the nation on the attack. And his speech was filled with overgeneralizations about the "evil doers", their acts of evil and how we would track them down and good would prevail over evil. Suddenly I felt better about what I had said to my 5 year old because I realized that Bush's parents had obviously explained it to him the same way.

I've got news for this anonymous letter writer. I hope that Bush's parents explained it to him this way, because it's the truth. It may be a shock to some, but put in the simplest terms, the 9/11 hijackers were bad people. History is full of many moments that were free from moral ambiguity, and this was absolutely one of them.

There are evil people in the world, and whatever Al-Qaeda's "justifiable" grievances with the USA were, it didn't even come close to justifying hijacking four planes and killing thousands of men, women, and children. As Tony Blair once remarked in a speech shortly after 9/11:

They have no moral inhibition on the slaughter of the innocent. If they could have murdered not 7,000 but 70,000, does anyone doubt they would have done so and rejoiced in it?

So there is no compromise possible with such people. There is no meeting of minds, no point of understanding with such terror. Just a choice: defeat it or be defeated by it.

I'm curious, when the letter writer explains the Holocaust to his children, does he feel conflicted that he isn't presenting the other side of the argument? Should I feel guilty labelling Nazi ideology as "evil", and not explaining the (extremely few) justified gripes the Germans had against their Jewish neighbors in the 1930s?

Of course, people are complicated, and under extreme circumstances, even good people can be driven to do horrible things. But that wasn't the case here. By and large, the hijackers came from wealthy families in Saudi Arabia. They lived privileged lives, and were sent overseas to be educated in the very nation they later attacked. Nor could they blame this atrocity for the influence of drugs, alcohol, or "temporary insanity". The operation was fully financed, carefully planned over a span of years, and with the specific goal of killing as many innocent people as possible.

But anyone can can be redeemed. And if the hijackers were caught before they committed this act, it's possible that one day they could have realized the error of their ways, and become "good" people once again after lengthy and intimate self-reflection over their personal beliefs. But since they deliberately killed themselves on Sep 11, they denied themselves the chance to do this, and at that time, they were "bad", "evil", "wicked", "immoral", or any number of other adjectives you wish to use.

And I am not the least bit "conflicted" in using them.

UPDATE 17/09/2007 07:45:00:
Glenn Reynolds of instapundit wrote me (paraphrasing Sullivan's view):

"Bad People" is a christianist category, showing simpleminded absolutism. Unless it refers to opponents of gay marriage.

This jogged my memory a bit. Look at this posting on Sullivan's site from June, after Ann Coulter publicly called Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards a "faggot":

The only tiny silver lining of my friend Chris Matthews' decision to give hate-monger Ann Coulter a platform is that Elizabeth Edwards called in to confront her - in particular the callous way in which Coulter once spoke of Edwards' dead son. Watch Coulter wither and flinch. It's rare to see a simple confrontation on cable television of good versus evil. And it's encouraging to see evil lose.

So in other words, being "callous" or calling someone "faggot" is "evil", but terrorism that indiscriminately kills is not necessarily. In Sullivan's view, anti-gay statements are far worse than, well, "anti-human" acts of mass-murder. It's great to see that some people have their priorities straight (no pun intended)...





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