Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

How so? First, the number of innocent persons killed on 9/11--3,000--is roughly equivalent to the number of innocent human beings killed every day in the United States by abortion. In the past thirty-five years, while abortion has claimed tens of millions of unborn human lives around the globe, international terrorism has claimed only tens of thousands of innocent lives. Second, more than 4,000 people around the world die miserable deaths each day as a result of starvation and dehydration. Several thousand civilian deaths unrelated to terrorist violence have occurred daily for years at a time in Nazi Germany (1940 to 1945), the Soviet Union (1945 to 1985), Iraq (1991 to 2003), Sudan (2003-), and many other nations plagued by corruption, despotism, turmoil, genocide and warfare. Are those human lives any less precious because they were not terminated by terrorist crime? Is an African or Middle Eastern life worth less than an American life? Not at all.

Third, this view of terrorism is an exercise in self-pity: we were the lone superpower, an invincible nation, with supposedly impregnable defense systems, and our pride was shattered. Those who attack our status, our ego, and our global power must be committing the worst evil that could possibly happen. Fourth, regarding terrorism as the supreme evil can incite the unruly passions of revenge and hatred against which our nation's founders continually warned, and which must be distinguished from legitimate self-defense and security concerns. Some people wish to thoroughly decimate the terrorists' home countries because they intend to annihilate our own. But the deliberate killing of noncombatants is never right, even to protect the United States or to attain victory in a war. Finally, the fifth problem with the neoconservative view of terrorism is that it is hypocritical. We steadfastly ignore the far worse evils we have been perpetrating in our own time. Our useless economic embargo of Iraq (1991 to 2003) killed 500,000 Iraqi children. We gave Israel moral and military support for two of its destructive invasions of Lebanon (1982 and 2006), which killed thousands of innocent civilians. And we continue to give Israel moral, economic and military support for its oppression and forced displacement of over four million Palestinian people. If we claim to stand for freedom and human rights, and if we claim that all nations must abide by the same standards of moral and international law, we must be honest with ourselves and admit that we have been recurrently participating in crimes equal to and greater than 9/11.

The primary evil we face today is not terrorism, but the evils of our own radically secularist culture described in the previous segment. Abortion, divorce, bad magazines and movies, and the arrogant drive for global imperialist domination, reflected in the unjust hyper-capitalist system which broadens the gulf between rich and poor, are all evils which America has helped disseminate throughout the world. Both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have repeatedly denounced the propagation of these sins. The latter two--imperialism and the economic chasm--are grave injustices unrecognized by neoconservatives which serve as temptations to terrorism, not to mention that our exportation of immorality to deeply religious Muslim societies sets off their anger and revulsion. External terrorists can destroy our bodies and our cities, but the internal evils of our culture threaten to destroy our souls in Hell. Let the morally conscious and upright reader decide which evil is the primary one.