Capital Letters, Ideals and the Madness of Fanaticism

Even as the Palestinian Authority's two ruling parties are busy killing each other in the streets, Secretary of State Rice continues to talk about peace and a Palestinian state.

It's 2007. Nearly 15 years ago Israel made major concessions to the PLO, giving up territory to it, arming it, supplying it and conducting extensive negotiations with it. Today territories held by it are enemy soil from which rockets fall on Israeli towns and where terrorists arm, train and set out from to murder Israeli soldiers and civilians.

After a decade and a half the Palestinian Authority has not set up anything remotely resembling a state, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars that have poured in every year from around the world. While those in power in Fatah have profited handsomely from that aid, beginning with Arafat, the area under their control is a disaster area.

America pushed for democractic elections and for Israeli withdrawals. Both of those happened and ended with Hamas in power. Now the US is backing and arming Fatah in the power struggle, despite the fact that Fatah remains a terrorist group, that money given to Fatah routinely disappears into the coffers of top officials and that rather than pursuing peace, Fatah has done nothing but pursue war.

All this seems like madness until we realize one simple thing. When Condoleeza Rice, political pundits, diplomats and the media discuss Peace, this is an ideal that has nothing to do with an actual state of peace on the ground. When you hear a news anchor talking about the importance of peace and you wonder why he can't see how insane this is while the gunfire continues, it's because he isn't talking about a condition of peace in which the fighting and terrorism ends. He's talking about Peace (capital P), as an ideal.

Liberals fanatically advocate absolute ideals as a shield for their policies and utterly ignoring the context and reality of their implementation on the ground, while treating anyone who opposes them as enemies of that ideal. Thus pointing out that the peace process is a failure and a sham makes you an enemy of Peace (again capital P), while advocating Peace is never wrong even if the only thing it produces on the ground is more war.

It's the same reason Democratic Senators can call for negotiations with Iran, even when it's clear to anyone that the Iranian government is run by fanatics who are determined to have nuclear weapons no matter what. But Peace is an absolute good, and Peace is achieved by Diplomacy (another capital letter), it doesn't matter that in this case all Diplomacy will achieve is the death of millions. The very same people who insisted on diplomacy to Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia will pursue the same course with Iran even as they smugly congratulate themselves on their moral enlightenment and ethical superiority to the warmongers.

When ideals are divorced from reality and policies from context, the results are horrific. While advocates of Peace are quick to follow the script and call their opponents fanatics, they're the fanatics because they utterly refuse to modify their worldview or the policies they advocate when they go wrong. George W. Bush has done so twice in his administration already. By contrast the average leftist is saying exactly what he was saying before 9/11, after 9/11 and probably dating back to the Vietnam War.

When Carter goes on his book tour calling Israel as an Apartheid state and the reason why there's still no peace, he's following that same fanatical playbook, which ultimately leads where all fanaticism leads, to genocide.

While Nazi warplanes were pounding London and American troops joining the war were on their way to England, left wing groups protested that the real reason the troops were coming was to suppress the Labor movement. As demented as this seems to any sane person, it's just as reasonable as advocating negotiations with genocidal regimes like North Korea and Iran and shouting vociferously that the whole thing is a plot by the Bush Administration to benefit Haliburton. These same lunatics were screaming No Blood for Oil when we invaded Afghanistan, though it wasn't clear what oil was to be found there. They got lucky the second time around when we invaded a country that was an actual oil producer.

Like those Labor Unionists in WW2, they have a vision of what is really going on, guided by the ramblings of Noam Chomsky and a hundred other conspiracy theorists. The real villains in this vision are America and Israel. The terrorists are only the dupes of the evil machinations of Christian and Jewish religious fanatics they shout, even as they stand shoulder to shoulder with members of Muslim organizations advocating the imposition of Muslim religious law.

But absolutes ignore reality and the fanatical pursuit of ideals lead inexorably to madness. While Hamas and Fatah go on killing each other and rockets rain down on Israeli towns, Secretary of State Rice talks of a Palestinian state.