Moral Paralysis on Mumbai

Dorothy Rabinowitz raises ultimate questions of moral responsibility in the West's reponse to terror in Mumbai. Why are these diabolical killings treated with such equanimity at the major news outlets? Rabinowitz discusses how some networks turned to Deepak Chopra for "expert" analysis on the attacks, and he responded by blaming the United States:

How the ebullient Dr. Chopra had come to be chosen as an authority on terror remains something of a mystery, though the answer may have something to do with his emergence in the recent presidential campaign as a thinker of advanced political views. Also commending him, perhaps, is his well known capacity to cut through all sorts of complexities to make matters simple. No one can fail to grasp the wisdom of a man who has informed us that "If you have happy thoughts, then you make happy molecules."

In his CNN interview, he was no less clear. What happened in Mumbai, he told the interviewer, was a product of the U.S. war on terrorism, that "our policies, our foreign policies" had alienated the Muslim population, that we had "gone after the wrong people" and inflamed moderates. And "that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster in Bombay."

It's not just the pundit class, but our top elected officials as well, including the president-elect, who have been underwhelming in their condemnation of the atrocities.

Across the blogosphere, of course, there's been a predictable split between moral outrage and moral indifference and equivalence. Quaker Dave, for example - who seems to use his religious identification as a mask for revolutionary anti-Americanism - basically threw up his hands in refusing to denounce the violence:

I’ve been trying to figure out how to comment on the slaughter that took place this week in Mumbai, India.

I’ve been following it as we all have.

I can make no sense of it. There’s no logic or reason for it.

All of it is senseless.

It’s terribly tragic. It serves no purpose. It will advance no cause.

All that will happen, after the clean up and the funerals and the investigations and the grandstanding, is that there will probably be international recriminations and repercussions.

And reprisals.

So more people will die.

And nothing will change.

And all that will have been accomplished is that so many innocent people will have died.

For nothing.

As usual.

Notice something here: There's no statement of moral outrage. Indeed, there's a brain-bursting unwillingness to condemn the attackers. You see, basically, no one is to blame. This kind of thing just happens, you know ...

Innocents have been stalked, tied up, tortured, and murdered, and Quaker Dave refuses to point fingers and name names. It's so characteristic of "progressive" activists.

It's all "terribly tragic," and unfortunately we wouldn't want to alienate "peaceful" Muslims by calling out Islamic leaders to repudiate their own faith.

Islam kills. It's a religion of victory, and those in the West don't do well for themselves by inviting the Deepak Chopra's of the celebrity world as commentators on such an unbelievable evil.