Ding-Dong! and All That

You're a vicious bastard, Rotelli.
I'm glad you're dead.
-- The Joker, Tim Burton’s “Batman”

Pro-abortionists will try to further silence the pro-life movement with hysterical charges of hypocrisy and moral responsibility for George Tiller’s murder. Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter are being blamed. One Kansas City pro-abortion columnist is already writing that “the same bullet that killed George Tiller also shattered the moral underpinnings of the movement that inspired its firing.” (“Hendricks: Tiller's killers were many”). The killer's accomplices include "every one who has ever called Tiller's late term abortion clinic a murder mill."

Not quite. The movement that inspired firing that bullet wasn't led by Coulter or O'Reilly or John Paul II: it was Tiller's assembly-line infanticide. And I hope the prominent pro-lifers who are going to be grilled about this on the talk shows this week don’t come out all apologies and tears for Tiller.

There may be an inclination in these spokespersons, as they watch the media sharpening long knives for their necks, to panic and try to placate the pro-abortion media with hasty protests that we regret the loss of Tiller’s life as much as that of any innocent unborn--as if that's even true, or as if the media will care, anyway.

I've even heard pro-lifers saying they thought Tiller, though misguided, believed he was helping women. Oh, brother.

I think that approach would be the worst thing. It would also be an example of moral nonsense. We don't regret Tiller's death that much. Why would we? There’s a very big distinction between regretting that a murder happened, and regretting that the victim is dead. Especially a victim who needed killing as bad as George Tiller did.

How many child molesters get sent to prison, to a fate of being brutalized and even murdered by their fellow inmates, who share a special hatred for child molesters, and we shrug our shoulders and cluck our tongues, because, on some level, it is only fitting. It is only justice.

It’s a widely recognized divine principle that those who live by violence face a powerful tendency to die through violence themselves. That isn’t a prescription for murder. It's not an excuse for vigilantism. It's simply a statement of a long-recognized law of existence, like gravity. When a person of faith learns that one such violence-maker has met a violent end, there’s no commandment that requires him to mourn the loss of the shedder of blood.

Tiller murdered (there is no other proper word for what he did) as many as 60,000 unborn children. All indications were that he intended to keep adding, industriously, to that total, even as the last of all conceiveable obstacles against him were being cleared away. It is morally ludicrous to style his death as either a tragedy, or an injustice. Tragedy requires the death of a virtuous hero. Injustice requires a wrongful depriving of another's rights. Tiller was born with a right to live, but forfeited that right by squandering his life by living to kill.

No pro-lifer needs to regret Tiller’s death. George Tiller chose--chose--to live his life as one of the few abortionists in the country debased enough to practice this kind of infanticide. He chose to live his life so that every day he worked at his profession he was the instrument of tragic death and bloodguilt for someone else. It's moral nonsense to call his death tragic when the tragedy was in the way he chose to live. There are lives lived so savagely, with so much willfull harm that their endings are a cause for rejoicing -- or at least relief -- among people of good will. Hitler, Stalin, Arafat, Uday and Qsay, al-Zarqawi, every one of these guys had to die so that the deaths of others could finally be halted. (It didn't last long after Arafat's death: but I still remember that springtime feeling when that fiend finally left Earth).

The fact that Tiller today will be unavailable, (because dead), at his Wichita death house to perform partial-birth abortions will have the direct and immediate benefit of saving the lives of at least some of the infants slated to die at his hands. I am at a loss to understand how that qualifies as a human tragedy.

It means that for a lot of a mothers eight or nine months pregnant with a sudden whim that their lives might be better without that kid, those kids' chances of being alive and kicking in 3 months just improved dramatically.

Does that mean the ends justify the means? No. Does that mean murder is the answer to abortion? Of course not. Abortion is murder. That's the point.

I never called for Tiller's murder, nor advocated for it. All I'm saying is that now that someone's murdered him, I'm glad he's dead. Think of it as looking on the bright side. And I'm not going to stop calling myself pro-life because I feel that way.

Suppose a house fell on him? How many of the pro-life advocates lamenting his death today as a tragedy would feel justified in saying there was justice in his demise, and the world was a better place without him? Is it hard on his wife, children, grandchildren? Yes, and that's regrettable, but not a cosmic tragedy. Most condemned criminals leave loved ones behind. Do you really think his wife didn't know where her lifestyle was coming from? Do you really think Reformation Lutheran Church didn't know how Tiller earned the offerings he contributed?

No one is going to make me feel responsible for Tiller’s murder just because I’m opposed to abortion. More to the moral-equivalence point, I'm not the one who wants murder legalized to justify my private relief that a person I didn’t want around is now dead.

What I did want was Tiller and his serial murders stopped. I first wanted him stopped by seeing Roe v Wade overturned, and sanity restored to American civil rights. That didn't happen. Then I hoped for a national ban on the infanticide that Tiller practiced. But that ban wasn’t enough in Kansas, where it was never enforced by an apparently lawless government. Then I wanted him stopped by the Kansas prosecutor who launched a criminal investigation against him. But that was thwarted by Democrat politicians in Kansas, most prominently Obama’s new HHS director, Kathleen Sebelius.

Recently Tiller was acquitted on 19 misdemeanor charges for illegally using another doctor, one on his payroll, to provide “independent” second opinions that his late-term abortions were necessary. The trial was notable for a lack of rigor by the pro-choice attorney general, and observers predicted it was headed for acquittal. Tiller was acquitted.

Yes, Tiller’s murderer was wrong. Vigilantism is wrong. Still, being pro-life, in my view, doesn't mean that every death is equally tragic, equally wrong, or even that every murder is equally tragic, or even tragic. Even our basic laws have always recognized murder happens in degrees, even that, once in a while, some homicide victims "needed killing." Being pro-life, to me, means that each person is conceived, created, with equal rights to live and be born. No one compromised Tiller's right to be born. He was born and grew up and became a doctor, and turned his God-given life to depriving others, 60,000 others, of the same right.

The fact that I haven’t an ounce of regret that Tiller is dead, whether by fire, famine, disease, or homicide -- and that consequently the babies scheduled this coming week to have their skulls pierced and their brains sucked out by Tiller in his charnel house now have a fighting chance to be born -- doesn’t make me an accomplice to his murder.

I wanted him stopped, and something, somewhere, stopped him. I’m supposed to be sorry about that? Was God behind it? I don't know. I have serious doubts about how upset He is. I don't recall reading where the Apostles cried too hard over Judas' suicide. Was Satan behind it? Not a fucking chance. Old Scratch is crying tonight, too. As Jesus said, can Satan stand against Satan? A house divided against itself cannot stand.

The devil has been robbed of one of his best soldiers.

The Left will pretend that lack of regret by pro-lifers equals moral participation in Tiller's murder. That’s nonsense. The Left will pretend that the deliberate murder of one bloody, murdering professional baby-killer is the moral equivalent (no, they'll say it's worse), of the legalized abortion regime that has taken the lives of 50 million innocent unborn. They will posture that Tiller's murder now balances the scales for all those dead unborn, and that the pro-lifers have to shut up about abortion now. That’s nonsense, too.

Tiller is as responsible for how he died as the person who killed him is. Could Tiller really have believed that he could spend every day jabbing his weapons into helpless human beings with the intention of ending their lives, life after life, day after day, for decades, for money, and then go to church, and not have some inkling that one day, by means of some instrumentality, some spiritual reflex, some invisible justice, some karmic fruition, some anguish at the heart of creation wasn’t going to strike back?

Tough Stuff

Daniel Pearl and the Normalization of Evil

When will our luminaries stop making excuses for terror?

By JUDEA PEARL

This week marks the seventh anniversary of the murder of our son, former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. My wife Ruth and I wonder: Would Danny have believed that today's world emerged after his tragedy?

The answer does not come easily. Danny was an optimist, a true believer in the goodness of mankind. Yet he was also a realist, and would not let idealism bend the harshness of facts.

Neither he, nor the millions who were shocked by his murder, could have possibly predicted that seven years later his abductor, Omar Saeed Sheikh, according to several South Asian reports, would be planning terror acts from the safety of a Pakistani jail. Or that his murderer, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, now in Guantanamo, would proudly boast of his murder in a military tribunal in March 2007 to the cheers of sympathetic jihadi supporters. Or that this ideology of barbarism would be celebrated in European and American universities, fueling rally after rally for Hamas, Hezbollah and other heroes of "the resistance." Or that another kidnapped young man, Israeli Gilad Shalit, would spend his 950th day of captivity with no Red Cross visitation while world leaders seriously debate whether his kidnappers deserve international recognition.

No. Those around the world who mourned for Danny in 2002 genuinely hoped that Danny's murder would be a turning point in the history of man's inhumanity to man, and that the targeting of innocents to transmit political messages would quickly become, like slavery and human sacrifice, an embarrassing relic of a bygone era.

But somehow, barbarism, often cloaked in the language of "resistance," has gained acceptance in the most elite circles of our society. The words "war on terror" cannot be uttered today without fear of offense. Civilized society, so it seems, is so numbed by violence that it has lost its gift to be disgusted by evil.

I believe it all started with well-meaning analysts, who in their zeal to find creative solutions to terror decided that terror is not a real enemy, but a tactic. Thus the basic engine that propels acts of terrorism -- the ideological license to elevate one's grievances above the norms of civilized society -- was wished away in favor of seemingly more manageable "tactical" considerations.

This mentality of surrender then worked its way through politicians like the former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. In July 2005 he told Sky News that suicide bombing is almost man's second nature. "In an unfair balance, that's what people use," explained Mr. Livingstone.

But the clearest endorsement of terror as a legitimate instrument of political bargaining came from former President Jimmy Carter. In his book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," Mr. Carter appeals to the sponsors of suicide bombing. "It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Road-map for Peace are accepted by Israel." Acts of terror, according to Mr. Carter, are no longer taboo, but effective tools for terrorists to address perceived injustices.

Mr. Carter's logic has become the dominant paradigm in rationalizing terror. When asked what Israel should do to stop Hamas's rockets aimed at innocent civilians, the Syrian first lady, Asma Al-Assad, did not hesitate for a moment in her response: "They should end the occupation." In other words, terror must earn a dividend before it is stopped.

The media have played a major role in handing terrorism this victory of acceptability. Qatari-based Al Jazeera television, for example, is still providing Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi hours of free air time each week to spew his hateful interpretation of the Koran, authorize suicide bombing, and call for jihad against Jews and Americans.

Then came the August 2008 birthday of Samir Kuntar, the unrepentant killer who, in 1979, smashed the head of a four-year-old Israeli girl with his rifle after killing her father before her eyes. Al Jazeera elevated Kuntar to heroic heights with orchestras, fireworks and sword dances, presenting him to 50 million viewers as Arab society's role model. No mainstream Western media outlet dared to expose Al Jazeera efforts to warp its young viewers into the likes of Kuntar. Al Jazeera's management continues to receive royal treatment in all major press clubs.

Some American pundits and TV anchors didn't seem much different from Al Jazeera in their analysis of the recent war in Gaza. Bill Moyers was quick to lend Hamas legitimacy as a "resistance" movement, together with honorary membership in PBS's imaginary "cycle of violence." In his Jan. 9 TV show, Mr. Moyers explained to his viewers that "each [side] greases the cycle of violence, as one man's terrorism becomes another's resistance to oppression." He then stated -- without blushing -- that for readers of the Hebrew Bible "God-soaked violence became genetically coded." The "cycle of violence" platitude allows analysts to empower terror with the guise of reciprocity, and, amazingly, indict terror's victims for violence as immutable as DNA.

When we ask ourselves what it is about the American psyche that enables genocidal organizations like Hamas -- the charter of which would offend every neuron in our brains -- to become tolerated in public discourse, we should take a hard look at our universities and the way they are currently being manipulated by terrorist sympathizers.

At my own university, UCLA, a symposium last week on human rights turned into a Hamas recruitment rally by a clever academic gimmick. The director of the Center for Near East Studies carefully selected only Israel bashers for the panel, each of whom concluded that the Jewish state is the greatest criminal in human history.

The primary purpose of the event was evident the morning after, when unsuspecting, uninvolved students read an article in the campus newspaper titled, "Scholars say: Israel is in violation of human rights in Gaza," to which the good name of the University of California was attached. This is where Hamas scored its main triumph -- another inch of academic respectability, another inroad into Western minds.

Danny's picture is hanging just in front of me, his warm smile as reassuring as ever. But I find it hard to look him straight in the eyes and say: You did not die in vain.

Mr. Pearl, a professor of computer science at UCLA, is president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, founded in memory of his son to promote cross-cultural understanding.