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The Peace Encyclopedia:
Moral Relativism, Moral Equivalence, Ethical Relativism, Cultural Relativism, Egalitarianism

Frequently Asked Questions:

  • What is Moral Relativism or Equivalence?
  • How does Moral Relativism creep into U.S. foreign policy?
  • How is Moral Equivalence being used in an effort to usurp Israel's ethical advantage?
  • Wouldn't there be peace if we treated our 'enemies' as our friends?
  • How does Moral Relativism affect the way in which Israel relates to its Arab minority?

What is Moral Relativism or Equivalence?

"...democracy's most numerous and influential educators deny the existence of objective truth concerning good and evil. In other words, they deny the existence of rational standards by which to determine whether the beliefs and goals of one individual, group, or nation are more valid or intrinsically superior to those of another. Reinforcing this relativism is the behavioral doctrine that humanity in general, and their rulers in particular, employ altruistic language like "peace" or "justice" or the "common good" to conceal egotistical motives or dignify self-serving ends. Cynicism is rampant. "...relativism erodes belief in the truth or justice of their country's cause and thereby undermines their country's ability to persevere in any conflict with regimes whose educators are not relativists".

Karl Marx...adopted Hobbes' reduction of thought to the subrational: "The PHANTOMS formed in the brain are ... bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence." Another perverse mind, exempting itself from its own conclusions.

Amazing how many academic earthlings have made a livelihood teaching this sophisticated madness. I say madness because, if "forms of consciousness" merely correspond to "material premises" or economic modes of production which change from epoch to epoch, or which differ from one country to another, it follows that what humans, hence academics, deem normal or abnormal, sane or insane, has no objective validity. Precisely the relativistic conclusion of anti-psychiatry! And what is most significant, anti-psychiatry was adopted by a neoMarxist movement in the West called the "New Left,"

- Prof. Paul Eidelberg, the Co-founder and President of the Foundation for Constitutional Democracy in the Middle East

Marxism incorporates, at the verbal level and the intellectual level, the values of liberal democracy in its assault on liberal democracy and this is precisely why it entraps so many Western intellectuals who are themselves serious liberal democrats. Thus the slightest restriction on, let's say, the presumption of innocence of the accused is said to demonstrate the absence of the rule of law. The slightest failure of an electoral system demonstrates contempt for political equality. Any use of force in international affairs establishes the lawless character of the society. Now, it is a short step from having demonstrated that a country like the United States is not a law-abiding society to demonstrating that it is lost and that it is like any other lawless society. The Soviets can always claim "We are no worse than you. Even if we are a lawless society, you too are a lawless society, we are no worse than you." This is the "logic" of the doctrine of moral equivalence. If practices are measured by abstract, absolute standards, practices are always found wanting. The communists who criticize liberal democratic societies measure our practices by our standards and deny the relevance of their practices to judgments concerning the moral worth of our own society.

...It's perfectly clear that the tendency to self-debasement, self-denigration which has been so brilliantly commented upon by the French scholar Jean Francois Revel and others recently is rooted in this practice of measuring Western democratic societies by utopian standards. There is simply no way that such measurements can result in anything but chronic, continuous self-debasement, self-criticism, and finally, self-disgust. The problem of dealing with this is complicated by the fact that the values in question are our own values. The response, of course, must be that it is not appropriate to judge actual social practices by utopian standards of political values.

- from The Myth of Moral Equivalence, by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Imprimis, January 1986, Vol. 15, No. 1

How does Moral Relativism creep into U.S. foreign policy?

"There is extraordinary danger in treating terror and democracy equivalently. There is extraordinary danger in placing the burden on your friends, because you are scared to tell the enemy the truth".

- Congressman Newt Gingrich (R-GA), Speaker of the House of Representatives, April 9, 1997, criticizing the Clinton administration for pressuring Israel but not the Arabs.

How is Moral Equivalence being used in an effort to usurp Israel's ethical advantage?

Israel's enemies appear to be poised to secure through skillful use of moral equivalence and other techniques of ideological warfare what they could not do with tanks, missiles and warplanes. The Arabs' goal remains the acquisition of territory vital to Israel's security and, in the process, the delegitimation of the underpinnings of Zionism -- that is, the 'historical connection of the Jews to Palestine....'

...The Israeli leadership and many in the American Jewish community have unintentionally played into this latest bid to establish moral equivalence between the principally Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the so-called "victims of Zionist aggression."

- Frank J. Gaffney, Center for Security Policy Director, U.S. Senate Caucus Room, 16 March 1994

At the end of the [Pope's] historically significant visit [to Israel], the bystander's conclusion must be that the pontiff was admirably evenhanded. He urged an end to "anti-Jewish feeling among Christians and anti-Christian feelings among Jews" - as if persecutor and persecuted can be considered on the same moral plane.

He likewise seemed to balance the suffering of the Palestinians, which he judged as excessively prolonged, with the suffering of the Jews at Christian hands, which had gone on for 2,000 years and which culminated in the Holocaust.

Even if only remotely implied, this equation is in itself a colossal affront. It not only dwarfs the Holocaust but imposes culpability on its Jewish survivors. It sins by omitting the basic fact that the Arabs were belligerents, and cruel aggressors at that. The Jews never harmed Germany.

- from ANOTHER TACK: Masters of our fates, by Sarah Honig in The Jerusalem Post Internet Edition, April 7 2000

In the United Nations, of course, genocide is regularly charged against Israel and only Israel is regularly described as violating the Geneva Convention. Along with the terms go the documents in which the values are enshrined and codified. What further complicates this is the effort not only to redefine values but to eliminate any epistemological standard - any standard of proof - by which events might be objectively observed and through which we might have appeal to the double bind in which the semantic falsification puts us. Totalitarian ideologies, including Marxism, are inevitably, invariably, anti-empirical. Not only do they deny that there is any sort of objective truth, they deny effectively empirical verification and procedures of empirical verification because they make truth, and not only truth, but reality, dependent on power relations, i.e., truth and objective reality are ultimately defined in a totalitarian ideology by those people who hold power.

- from The Myth of Moral Equivalence, by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Imprimis, January 1986, Vol. 15, No. 1

Wouldn't there be peace if we treated our 'enemies' as our friends?

...I must now say a word about Muslims and the Arab-Islamic world. In that world relativism has no foothold. Yet, everywhere in that sprawling domain Arafat is embraced as a brother--a brother in Jewish blood. This barbarism is of ancient vintage, as I learned even from an emancipated Arab scholar. Thus, in the 14th century, Ibn Khaldun, an historian influenced by two illustrious Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, boldly declared that "Arabs are people who[se] ... savagery has become their character and nature." To this day it is only in Arab-Islamic states which amputate human limbs for trivial offenses.

Indeed, during the last two decades, almost a million Muslims slaughtered each other in a war between Iraq and Iran; 100,000 Muslims and Christians butchered each other in Lebanon; 20,000 Arabs were murdered by their own countrymen in Syria. And what is more, after ravaging Kuwait, his Arab neighbor, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein won the support of Israel's own Arab citizens despite his threat to incinerate them along with the Jews! All this bloodshed is done in the name of a religious doctrine which thinly adorns a hard core of evil aggressiveness.

Intimately linked to Arab bellicosity is mendacity. In this century, an emancipated Arab sociologist, Sonia Hamady, admitted that "Lying is a widespread habit among Arabs, and they have a low idea of truth." They lie not only to "infidels" but to each other. Another indication of a flawed religion no one questions in an era of cultural relativism.

...[Here is] what an exceptional and thoughtful Arab of old might think of Jews who made agreements with their mendacious and unrepentant enemies. Here is what Ibn Hazm of the 11th century wrote: "The height of goodness is that you should neither oppress your enemy nor abandon him to oppression. To treat him as a friend is the work of a fool whose end is near."

- Prof. Paul Eidelberg, the Co-founder and President of the Foundation for Constitutional Democracy in the Middle East

How does Moral Relativism affect the way in which Israel relates to its Arab minority?

"...We are dealing with politicians who daily perceive Arab hostility but who cannot cope with such hostility because of their compulsive, egalitarian mentality. A mindless self-defense mechanism induces them to defame as "racist" anyone who, out of concern for the cultural self-preservation of the Jewish people, recommends some limitation on the voting power of Israel's burgeoning Arab population. (The simple desire for cultural self-preservation prompted Japan to limit citizenship to ethnic Japanese. Which indicates that democracies which do not make equality a fetish or totalitarian principle [need not succumb from egalitarinism].)

Is it rational, is it just, that Arabs opposed to Israel's existence should be accorded the equal political rights of Jews who work or fight and even die for Israel's existence? How shall we describe those who insist on such indiscriminate, such monstrous, equality even though this democratic principle will logically lead to democratic Israel's demise?

"...the egalitarian and culturally neutral principle of one adult/one vote will enable Israel's prolific Arabs to transform the country into an Arab-Islamic dictatorship. ...compulsive egalitarianism prevents them from addressing this dilemma. This compulsion, permeated by fear, inhibits politicians across the political and religious spectrum from confronting the problem of Israel's shrinking Jewish majority. They surely know from current estimates that Arabs, now 20% of Israel's population, may number 8.5 million by the year 2010, a demographic time-bomb. Even before then, and thanks to the policy of "territory for peace," Israel will have the highest population density in the world!

- Prof. Paul Eidelberg is the Co-founder and President of the Foundation for Constitutional Democracy in the Middle East

Theo van Gogh and Education By Murder in Holland
Click here to find out about the Danish Cartoon Jihad

Theo Van Gogh Murder and Islam

Also see: Beslan Child Slaughter
Responses to Ed Barlow of Creating the Future

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