False equivalencies

Charles Krauthammer notes the President's tic to try to appease foreign audiences by appearing to see all sides and find a parallel between truly non-parallel histories. Thus, Obama adopts this "on the one hand, on the other hand" approach to world issues and history. Note this false relativism to find equivalencies of kind and to ignore the differences of degree.

(A) He told Iran that, on the one hand, America once helped overthrow an Iranian government, while on the other hand "Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians." (Played a role?!) We have both sinned; let us bury the past and begin anew.

(B) On religious tolerance, he gently referenced the Christians of Lebanon and Egypt, then lamented that the "divisions between Sunni and Shia have led to tragic violence" (note the use of the passive voice). He then criticized (in the active voice) Western religious intolerance for regulating the wearing of the hijab -- after citing America for making it difficult for Muslims to give to charity.

(C) Obama offered Muslims a careful admonition about women's rights, noting how denying women education impoverishes a country -- balanced, of course, with this: "Issues of women's equality are by no means simply an issue for Islam." Example? "The struggle for women's equality continues in many aspects of American life."

Well, yes. On the one hand, there certainly is some American university where the women's softball team has received insufficient Title IX funds -- while, on the other hand, Saudi women showing ankle are beaten in the street, Afghan school girls have acid thrown in their faces, and Iranian women are publicly stoned to death for adultery. (Gays, as well -- but then again we have Prop 8.) We all have our shortcomings, our national foibles. Who's to judge?

This may appeal to intellectuals and liberals like Newsweek's Evan Thomas who earned deep scorn for his description of Obama as standing above the country as "sort of God," but it is evidence of a truly fallacious view of the world.

That's the problem with Obama's transcultural evenhandedness. It gives the veneer of professorial sophistication to the most simple-minded observation: Of course there are rights and wrongs in all human affairs. Our species is a fallen one. But that doesn't mean that these rights and wrongs are of equal weight.

....For all of his philosophy, the philosopher-king protests too much. Obama undoubtedly thinks he is demonstrating historical magnanimity with all these moral equivalencies and self-flagellating apologetics. On the contrary. He's showing cheap condescension, an unseemly hunger for applause and a willingness to distort history for political effect.

Distorting history is not truth-telling but the telling of soft lies. Creating false equivalencies is not moral leadership but moral abdication. And hovering above it all, above country and history, is a sign not of transcendence but of a disturbing ambivalence toward one's own country.

In one of the fawning interviews that Obama has with people like Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams it would be lovely, but unimaginable, to see someone press him on this moral relativism. Ask him if he really sees an equivalency between how women are treated in our country and in Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia where a woman who is raped can be stoned to death and where women can't even get drivers licenses. Of course, no one forces him to defend his moral relativism that seems to find everyone at fault and thus ignores the deep differences in degree between how Muslims are treated in the United States and how Christians and Jews are treated in Muslim countries.

Moral relativism is just an excuse to continue to find fault with our own country while downplaying what other countries are doing. Liberals did this all throughout the Cold War claiming that our own nation's ills made it illegitimate to criticize the Soviets. And now Obama has just shifted from finding moral equivalencies between the U.S. and the Soviet Union to marking false parallels between our country and the countries of the Middle East.