moral clarity

The Case For Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza
$9.95
Professor Dershowitz provides a clear and thoughtful analysis of many current aspects of the Arab/Israeli conflict. This is a collection of previously written letters, essays, and debates. But they all are quite recent (mostly 2009) and applicable to the recent fighting in Gaza. Dershowitz clearly shows that there is no moral equivalence between the Israeli and the Arabs positions. The Arabs are using the methods of terrorism and committing crimes against humanity. Israeli is making extraordinary efforts to avoid harming civilians and is being inappropriately blamed for the Arab civilian casualties.

Dershowitz clearly favors Israel but I believe that his statements are, by and large, factual and unbiased. As another reviewer noted, he may use the term "antisemite" too broadly. Also, I think he lumps too much into the term "hard left." But this is not supposed be a book about the nuances of the extreme left wing position. It would take a much longer book to dissect the psychology, motives, and methods of various academics who persistently distort the facts to place not only Israel, but the United States and other democratic countries and institutions in a bad light. For a short text, this give an amazingly clear and understandable, not to mention, accurate picture of the current Arab/Israeli conflict.

Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism
$15.95
For too long we have allowed the PC view of the world to control our thoughts, making some of the most absurd positions the accepted "truth". William Bennett here lays it all out in a succinct and clear fashion, helping bring us back to reality, and showing us why we must maintain and promote moral clarity in the face of sworn enemies.
We cannot assume that all nations and peoples will act benevolently towards us when we do so towards them; that is the utopian wishful thinking of the 60's which history clearly debunks. We also cannot lose sight of the fact that Islam is not just a religion but also a political system whose major tenet is that of converting the world to its religion, and submitting it to its political control. That, above all else, has been behind Muslim agression for 1300 years, and the "excuse of the week" (Israel, our presence in the Gulf, etc.) is only used as a means of continuing the Jihad duty to which all Muslims are sworn and to convince ignorant Westerners of the justness of their "struggle".
Read this book and bring yourself back to reality.

Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (Revised Edition)
$24.95
Book starts with Old Testament stories and Plato. Four hundred pages later she's still talking about Plato and Moses, after wading through a plethora of the same old names. It's like a doctoral dissertation that no one but the doctoral committee skims through.
She never recognizes, but almost no one else does either, that as long as there are nations, religions and so-called `cultures' there will be conflict, misery and war.
The title is a dead giveaway. Moral Clarity. Bush thinks he is morally clear, so does the Taliban. The dust jacket reveals the rest, A Guide for Grown-up Idealists.
Idealism is what got us here. There is no such thing as grown-up idealism, it's all childish.

Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy
$26.95
Dr. Neiman has produced a competent "history of [the problem of evil in] modern philosophy" from Leibniz to John Rawls. Speaking of Rawls, Neiman obtained her doctorate studying with him. Other relevant biographical information about Neiman is that she left home in her teen years to protest the war in Vietnam, and recently wrote a piece on Culture War for the leftist Huffington Post. None of these ad hominem (feminam?) observations disqualify "Evil," but they set it in context.

My problem is that throughout the book, Neiman refers only to "the problem" of evil. A problem is a question, either more simple or complicated, that has a specific, concrete answer, that either you will eventually attain to, or at least someone else has or could.

But evil is not a problem. No matter how long one studies it, one will never be able to completely conceptualize or lucidly verbalize evil. That is why I think the best category under which to analyze evil is 'mystery.' Of course, those of the same enlightenment background as Dr. Neiman will balk at such a word, presuming that they have banished 'mystery' to its primitive corner. But it is possible to use the word mystery not about a 'whodunnit' novel, and not about a religious cultic experience. A mystery is a profound philosophical question, like love, death, personhood, etc., about which one can do much reflection, gather much light, rule out absurd propositions, but which ultimately cannnot, due to the nature of the subject, be encapsulated in concepts or contained in words. That was the enligtenment's dream, dashed upon the rocks of the Judaeo-Christian mystery of original sin, as best observed at Auschwitz and Hiroshima in the so-called modern 20th century.

Typical of this genre, on p. 335 Neiman equates the Middle Ages with the Dark Ages, an undergraduate mistake, yet one normal for those who think everything prior to Spinoza was bad, everything after him was good.

Methinks that enlightenment scholars, even at this very late date, doth protest the death of God too much. That may be true on the narrow strips of land of western Europe, and both coasts of the USA, but virtually nowhere else. Nieman, and other fans of the enlightenment (which brought our culture the lovely French Revolution, whose grandchild was the Bolshevik) seem wistful that we are now in the post-modern age, when we take the positive insights of the enlightenment (of which there are many), and blend them with the perennial insights of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome.