Grotesque celebrations of terrorism, those demonstrations exemplify what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil”. It is “banal” because it is the evil that grows from suspending, suppressing or entirely abandoning the capacity to tell right from wrong. There is the evil of the morally deranged, the fanatics who allow their death cults to override the faculty of judgment; but there is also the evil of the morally deprived, who, washing their hands of moral responsibility, take refuge in a moral equivalence that conflates victims and executioners, the terrorists and the terrorised.
It is precisely the horrifying “everyday thoughtlessness” of those Pontius Pilates that Arendt tried to capture in her famous phrase; and it is precisely because not thinking is so easy and so comfortable that it threatens, “like a fungus, to devastate reality by laying waste to its surface”.
We have seen plenty of that in recent days, from the NSW Police Minister to state and federal parliaments; there will be even more of it in the days ahead.
Woefully ignorant both of international law and of the realities of war, drenched in the moral earnestness that is nothing but moral luxury, those voices are the price we pay for having bred the moral sense out of large sections of an entire generation, much as the wings have been bred off chickens to produce more white meat.
Little wonder then that the religion-hating
Greens, who epitomise the wingless generation’s moral confusion, have linked arms with Islamic fundamentalists who would, if only they could, crucify gays, behead transsexuals and force women into the perpetual darkness of illiteracy, childhood marriages and burqas.https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/from-hamas-to-lakemba-this-was-evil-...
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Israel At War (Read 52859 times)
