John Podhoretz, who has advocated war against Iran and Iraq, is outraged by the evil in Norway:
The monstrous events today in Norway—as of this writing, word is that a gunman slaughtered at least 30 kids at a youth camp who had gathered to hear about the earlier bombing of government offices in Oslo—have stirred in me a kind of rage I haven’t felt this viscerally since the days after 9/11, when my apartment in Brooklyn Heights looked out directly on the violent purple gash in the sky that hovered over the wreckage like a demonic counterimage of the holy cloud that followed the Jews through the desert in the aftermath of the Exodus. Perhaps it is that my own daughter is, as I write, at her own day camp outside New York City, and so there is something visceral, primal, in my sense of connection to the dead and dying and their parents. This rage, which is accompanied by all manner of violent thoughts about what should be done and could be done to the living body of the depthlessly evil monster who committed this Satanic act, is disturbing in its intensity. I would like it to go away. But it won’t, and it shouldn’t, because without it–without a stark response to something so purposefully awful–we are unilaterally disarming ourselves. The monster and his comrades have the passion to commit their foul deeds. If we respond with dispassion, we are ceding to them part of the animating force that makes us human. If we decide to intellectualize our emotions rather than allow them to influence us, we are turning our back on our responsibility to those whose lives were stripped from them.
So, it’s evil for Saudis to kill Americans, it’s evil for Norwegians to kill Norwegians and nominal Norwegians, but it is a moral imperative for Americans to kill Iraqis and Iranians. Got it? Let’s compare the bodycount to date:
9/11: 2,996 deaths. VISCERAL RAGE!
Oslo: 92 deaths. DEPTHLESS AND SATANIC EVIL!
Iraq: 135,369 deaths. NOT ENOUGH DEAD SUNNIS! (1)
Iran: ???? deaths. KILL AMALEKITES FOR ISRAEL! (2)
(1) “What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn’t kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn’t the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?”
(2) “If Barack Obama wants Israel to pull back to the 1967 borders, a position that could not be politically achieved today. If he thought that would solve everything, the best way for him to do that is to hit Iran’s nuclear facilities. If the US takes out Iran’s nuclear capacity and Obama goes to Jerusalem and says, ‘I have saved you from Amalek, I have saved you from the revival of the greatest threat to the Jewish people, you do something for me.”
Needless to say, Podhoretz the Younger is not only selective about what sort of deaths fill him with BOUNDLESS RAAAAGE and what sort he would like to see more of, but he also supports the very sort of immigration policy that appears to have led to yesterday’s lethal attacks in Norway.
“[A]s a Jew, I have great difficulty supporting a blanket policy of immigration restriction because of what happened to the Jewish people after 1924 and the unwillingness of the United States to take Jews in.”
So, Norway should permit Sri Lankans and Tunisians to settle in Norway because the USA didn’t permit Jews to settle in the USA in 1924. Got it? Podhoretz’s emotional histrionics are particularly ironic in light of the way the logic of his various positions suggests that the U.S. military should have attacked the Utoya Worker’s League camp and slaughtered everyone “between the ages of 15 and 35” in order to save Norway from Cush. The amusing thing is that there is a very good chance that at least one of the deaths that so outrage him now was that of a male Sunni between 15 and 35.
It also strikes one that perhaps the Iranians should consider rethinking their strategy vis-a-vis Israel. Instead of pursuing nuclear weapons, which is, per Podhoretz, bad, Tehran should simply order a few hundred thousand of its citizens to peacefully immigrate to Israel, which is, per Podhoretz, good. No doubt this will cause Podhoretz the Younger to abandon his call for war with Iran and joyfully embrace the new Persian-Israelis.
UPDATE – One wonders if Podhoretz will soon express similar rage over the death of a 35-year old youth who was gunned down in Tehran today.