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Jewish World Review June 18, 2002 / 8 Tamuz, 5762

John Leo

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Going soft in the head


http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Can the war on terrorism be waged by a population mostly raised on post-1960s "soft" values? By soft, I mean the values pushed by schools and the elites-sensitivity, subjectivity, tolerance, self-esteem, a therapy-based view of behavior, relativism, and nonjudgmentalism, all replacing the "hard" values of individual responsibility, objectivity, self-control, patriotism, strong social expectations, and commitment to moral judgments.

If you think soft values are adequate for the job, the behavior of Johnelle Bryant should set off bells. Bryant, a Department of Agriculture official, told ABC that Mohamed Atta had visited her Florida office seeking a government loan for what turned out to be the attack on the World Trade Center.

If Atta had said clearly that he wanted to kill lots of Americans at taxpayer expense, Bryant might have caught on. Instead, he gave a few clues that left her unruffled: He threatened to cut her throat; he said he wanted to fly a crop-duster; he praised Osama bin Laden; he talked about the destruction of prominent landmarks and asked about security around them. The problem wasn't simply that Bryant was a bonehead. She also was a gusher of multicultural understanding and nonjudgmental soft values. She very much wanted to "help him make his relocation into our country as easy for him as I could," she said. As JWR's Mark Steyn wrote in Canada's National Post, she was in a "sensitivity coma."

Consider, too, reports that soft values are a factor in dealing with Taliban prisoners at Guantánamo.The Times of London says interrogations are turning into "a politically correct farce," with prisoners mocking and threatening guards and throwing water at them. According to the Times, one interrogator was removed after prisoners complained that he was too rough. Prisoners said walking in leg irons was too difficult, so now authorities let them ride in golf carts. But do the carts have canopies to protect prisoners from sunburn?

Promoting jihad. Harvard displayed its soft value system by inviting Zayed Yasin to be a student orator at commencement. Yasin tried to raise funds for Holy Land, a foundation linked to the terrorist group Hamas. Holy Land in effect subsidizes terrorism by financially supporting the families of suicide bombers. Most controversy over Yasin focused on the planned title for his speech, "American Jihad." Yasin said jihad simply means "struggle," not "holy war." Fine. The German word kampf means struggle too. Would the Harvard of 1944 have sponsored a commencement address on "Mein Kampf, American-style," by a speaker with ties to a group that supports the widows of German assassination squads? Probably not.

The irrational mess we have made of "racial profiling" is a grand example of how soft values harden into bureaucratic attitudes and enter the legal culture. How did it become unfair, if not racist, to look hard among Arab and Muslim visitors while searching for Arab and Muslim terrorists? The press has helped create the problem, though here and there a ray of sunshine appears. Columnist Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times said the press should take some blame for the FBI's mishandling of the Zacarias Moussaoui case, because "liberals like myself- and the news media caldron in which I toil and trouble-have regularly excoriated law enforcement authorities for taking shortcuts and engaging in racial profiling."

Also fouled up are foreign-student programs, mostly because the new value system cannot come to grips with the actual threat. In the Chicago Sun-Times, John O'Sullivan points out that between 1981 and 1999, the United States enabled students from Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia to receive 657 doctorates here in potentially dangerous technical fields. "Dr. Germ," the head of Saddam Hussein's bioterrorism program, got his Ph.D. in Britain. But there is no drive to place some schooling off limits for students from some countries.

Psychological resistance to the war on terrorism seems considerable among believers in soft values, many of whom express a vague ambivalence about whether America even has a right to do what must be done. For confidence and moral clarity, I recommend the view of British journalist Christopher Hitchens. After the U.S. attack on the Taliban, he wrote: "There will be other mutants to fight. But if, as the peaceniks like to moan, more bin Ladens will spring up to take his place . . . there are many more who will also spring up to kill him all over again. And there are more of us and we are both smarter and nicer, as well as surprisingly insistent that our culture demands respect too." Ah, give me those old-time hard values.

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JWR contributor John Leo's latest book is Incorrect Thoughts: Notes on Our Wayward Culture. Send your comments by clicking here.

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