Who Deserves Our Support?

Whenever I begin to debate certain issues such as the war in Iran or the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, I am confronted with the fact that the side I support has done some pretty stupid (sometimes evil) things. America supported the Shah, who was an oppressive dictator. Israel enabled the rise of Hamas by supporting Islamist social and charitable organizations within Gaza in order to create a counterweight to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). And then there allegations of even more sinister actions, ranging from the plausible to the ridiculous. It is easy to see why so many people retreat to a kind of neutrality. They shrug and say both sides have some valid points. Who can know which is worth supporting?

Without a well-grounded philosophical framework, there really IS no way to know. You end up mired in an endless chain of “but they did this to us!” and “only because they did that to us!” If you think conceptually, though — in terms of principles and knowing that ideas motivate behavior — then it starts to become easier to separate out the “good guys” from the “bad guys.” I wrote about this issue last year, but I think there’s more to be said.

In general terms and in spite of some notable exceptions, I consider America to be one of the good guys. This is not mere chauvinism based on it being “my” country. It is for the same reasons that Ayn Rand admired it and chose to become a U.S. citizen. She wrote: “The most profoundly revolutionary achievement of the United States of America was the subordination of society to moral law. The principle of man’s individual rights represented the extension of morality into the social system—as a limitation on the power of the state, as man’s protection against the brute force of the collective, as the subordination of might to right. The United States was the first moral society in history.”

It is also true, though, that America didn’t live up to its convictions right from the start. The republic was formed with a massive contradiction at its core: one of its founding tenets was that “all men are created equal” — but it also tolerated slavery. There were other contradictions, some of which were corrected over time, some of which persist. But up until recently (and still, to a certain extent, despite the best efforts of some of our intellectuals and politicians), there remains a core of belief in reason, individualism, and the rule of law in America that has served to make it a beacon, and has helped to spread these ideas around the world. America has been the cornerstone of what we think of as “the West” or “Western Civilization.” It is a product of the Enlightenment, and to the extent it has been true to its founding ideals, it is profoundly good.

By contrast, the Muslim world had an earlier brush with the essentially Aristotelian ideas of the Enlightenment (the Islamic Golden Age), but then turned away from them, instead embracing faith, collectivism, and a top-down authoritarian view of law and of society.

Israel, for all its flaws, is part of the Western tradition and, like America, essentially one of the good guys. That is why the Arabs living there are freer than in any other nation in the Middle East. When Israelis commit crimes against Arabs, they are deviating from the ideals of their society. What’s more, generally there are mechanisms in place by which injustices can be addressed.

By contrast, the Arab world is dominated by Islam, whose ideals are fundamentally different. Law is dictated by the Koran, i.e., by divine revelation. There is no real concept of individual rights, and very limited mechanisms for redress against injustices. Mullahs or other authorities make the decisions. The core of this system is submission (that is the literal translation of the Arabic word “islam”). Everyone must surrender to the will of Allah — as interpreted, of course, by his representatives on earth. In this system, it is those who will not submit (rather than those who violate the rights of others) who are seen as deserving of punishment. It’s a fundamentally different way of organizing the world, and is completely at odds with the modern (Western) world view, which is still to a large extent based on Enlightenment ideals. In the Western framework, flourishing is the goal. The focus is on success and happiness in this world, rather than in the “next.”

So, on the surface, if you’re not thinking conceptually, it might be hard to make a distinction between this group dropping bombs and that group dropping bombs. You might be tempted to view the conflict in terms of who is the underdog. Who is the David fighting Goliath? Of course, even on these terms, it’s pretty bizarre to view a nation of about 10 million (Israel) as the Goliath when they are facing down Iran (a nation of about 90 million) or the entire Arab world (around 500 million) or the entire Islamic world (perhaps as many as 2 billion). But regardless, this is the wrong way to look at the conflict. Instead, we should be thinking in terms of what kind of civilization does each side represent? What values would we like a society to uphold — and which of these “sides” better represents those values? Sometimes the answer is neither. In some conflicts, both sides are so terrible that it would be a mistake to support either one. But in this case, Israel and the U.S. clearly embody Western ideals (however poorly they might sometimes live up to them). Hamas and the IRGC (and much of the Muslim world, unfortunately) embody a medieval world view that not only leads to death and oppression, but explicitly promotes them.

The focus in Islam on the “next world” is hardly unique. Christianity shared this focus for over a thousand years — and the result was stagnation, oppression, and death. Similarly terrible results will occur if the Christian Nationalists in the U.S. get their way. So I don’t consider my views “Islamophobic.” If anything, they could be described as religion-phobic or mysticism-phobic. But that would still be inaccurate, as a phobia is an irrational fear — and I think it makes perfect sense to fear the return of a religious world view that resulted in centuries of misery.

But there is another, better way to organize the world, and that’s why those who understand this, even if only in part (like Israel and the U.S.), deserve our support over those who seek to return the world to a state of barbarism. That doesn’t mean blindly applauding everything the U.S. or Israel does (one of the virtues of these countries is the freedom to criticize them), but it does mean understanding the fundamental distinction between free and unfree societies — between good societies that sometimes makes mistakes, and fundamentally bad societies that (like all societies) have many good people in them who are just trying to live their lives.

Once you understand the distinction, you might come to understand that the only way to “Free Palestine” or to truly support any of the “underdogs” in the world is to free them from the ideological chains of their terrible belief systems. Fundamentally, these people are not angry at the West because they have (sometimes legitimate) grievances about particular actions, but because they resent the example that even a semi-free society presents. While we can’t force people to be free or even to believe in freedom as an ideal, we can (and should) show them the utter futility of continuing to support the death cult of Islamism. It was only utter defeat that discredited Nazism in Germany and emperor-worship in imperial Japan — and allowed them to develop into much happier, freer, and more prosperous societies. That is what I wish for Palestine, Iran, and all the oppressed people of the world.