On the Normalization of Evil
Herb Denenberg's opinion piece in The Bulletin should be required reading in Washington ... and in divinity schools and newsrooms across America. He writes:
Perhaps the most serious and most dangerous problem we face is the normalization of evil. That’s the title of an essay published on Feb. 3, 2009 in the Wall Street Journal by Judea Pearl, father of Daniel Pearl, the 38-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter who was beheaded by Islamofascist terrorists in Pakistan.Click here to read the entire essay.
The title of the article, “The Normalization of Terror,” and its theme carry a devastating message, showing how the mainstream media, many of our leading universities, and people like Jimmy Carter and Bill Moyers have succeeded in transforming the most despicable, immoral, genocidal degenerates into a respectable category — freedom fighters, part of a resistance movement — even though they are using the most illegitimate, immoral, and illegal ends to achieve their political goals.
These are the real moral degenerates of our time, with the likes of Jimmy Carter and Bill Moyers leading the parade of evil, followed by many in our elite universities and the mainstream media. They speak in Orwellian language, turning evil into good, murder and genocide into resistance, and blowing the brains out of young children into acts of heroism. What is most disturbing about this terrible trend is that barbarism seems to be going mainstream even in America.
This is the story that Judea Pearl tells so well and so powerfully that it is a classic of the English language and a message that should be engraved on the mind and soul of every civilized person.
At the end of his powerful message to establish moral clarity in a world gone mad, Mr. Pearl writes, “Danny’s picture is hanging just in front of me, his warm smile as reassuring as ever. But I find it hard to look him straight in the eyes and say: You did not die in vain.”
Mr. Pearl says it is now seven years after the murder of his son, and then asks, “Would Danny have believed that today’s world emerged after his tragedy?
“The answer does not come easily. Danny was an optimist, a true believer in the goodness of mankind. Yet he was also a realist, and would not let idealism bend the harshness of facts.
“Neither he, nor the millions who were shocked by his murder, could have possibly predicted that seven years later his abductor, Omar Saeed Sheikh, according to several South American reports, would be planning terror acts from the safety of a Pakistani jail. Or that his murderer, Khalid Sheiky Mohammed, now in Guantanamo, would proudly boast of his murder in a military tribunal in March 2007 to the cheers of the sympathetic jihadi supporters. Or that this ideology of barbarism would be celebrated in European and American universities, fueling rally after rally for Hamas, Hezbollah and other heroes of ‘the resistance.’ Or that another kidnapped young man, Israeli Gilad Shalit, would spend his 950th day of captivity with no Red Cross visitation while world leaders seriously debate whether his kidnapers deserve international recognition.”
Judea Pearl would have thought that the murder of his son, Danny, would actually be a turning point in man’s inhumanity to man, and that the slaughter of innocents to communicate political messages would once and for all be universally condemned by civilized people and sent to the ashcan of history, where such gross barbarism is no longer tolerated, the place reserved for such atrocities as slavery, human sacrifice, and other shocking and totally discredited practices of an era long gone.
But the moral degenerates mentioned above have given these icons of evil, these most degenerate of moral degenerates, moral standing in our society and acceptance in elite circles of universities, of the media, and of political leadership. Mr. Pearl says we have reached the point where we are no longer disgusted by evil: “Civilized society, so it seems, is so numbed by violence that it has lost its gift to be disgusted by evil.”
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