| | Negotiating with Evil
My point is that there is a moral principle of not compromising with evil. Even to negotiate with a terrorist or the head of a terrorist nation means that there is something to negotiate about. And I am not talking about someone who uses guerilla tactics because of some sort of amenable political dispute, but with someone whose explicitly stated goal is your subjugation or destruction. Will we let our enemies destroy just a little bit of Israel? Just a little bit (more) of Manhattan?
I.e., what part of:
"We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you."
don't people get? Cut and paste that sentence into Google and you will see that it is not some paranoid fear of mine but the stated goal of an isl@mist terrorist organization funded by Iran.
There are many people who don't understand moral principles, or who don't integrate them into their lives. In 1938 British PM Neville Chamberlain negotiated a peace treaty with Hitler; "My good friends, for the second time in our history a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time." And so did Stalin in his non-aggression treaty. The consequences were 48,000,000 dead - look it up.) And some people aren't hypocrites - they're just plain effing evil. I have to assume that Barack Obama is one of the hypocrites, since I don't know him well enough to judge him as evil. But what do you say about a man whose pastor spouts lunatic, hateful, racist anti-American rhetoric for twenty years without him apparently noticing?
(BTW, I am white, and look like a cop. I have a murdered black boyfriend whose idol was Malcom X. I've been refused service in stores when hanging out with black friends. I have been arrested dozens of times for being with blacks or in black neighborhoods. I know what it is to get physically ill at the beating of Rodney King and the murders of Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell. I won't go into detail about whom I've threatened with a broken jaw for saying what bigoted remark. I am not some totally clueless white geek.)
While Obama is quite willing to negotiate with a man who has said that the holocaust didn't happen and that Israel should be wiped off the map, he's not above hinting at the sort of orders he'll be issuing at home:
"We can't drive our SUVs and, you know, eat as much as we want and keep our homes on, you know, 72 degrees all the time, whether we're living in the desert or we're living in the tundra, and then just expect every other country is going to say OK."
So we can negotiate with murderers as equals. Our own personal freedoms are not sacrosanct. We're going to start asking the Belgians for permission to do what we like with what we own.
Never mind, he is evil.
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