Dan Hodges on moral superiority
Dan Hodges writes in The Telegraph:
I’m not sure if Reyaad Khan or Ruhul Amin – the two ISIS fighters killed by an RAF drone strike – were personally responsible for throwing two gay men off a roof in Homs two months ago. Perhaps they were part of the mob that waited below to throw rocks at their broken bodies.
Maybe it was them who doused Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh in petrol, locked him in a cage and burnt him alive. Or they were behind some of the rapes Angelina Jolie talked about in the House of Commons yesterday, rapes of girls as young as seven that she said were being used by ISIS as the “centrepoint of their terror”.
Anyway, we’ll never know now, because they’re dead. And I’m glad they’re dead. I wish all the Isil butchers were dead. Drones. Smart bombs. The tip of a bayonet. It doesn’t really bother me how. The more of them we can kill, the better.
At least, that was my initial reaction when I heard about their deaths. “Good”, I said to myself, “they got what was coming to them.”
You’re a fighter for ISIL and in my eyes you’re a legitimate target, just as the Waffen SS were.
The Left have immediately scrambled to the top of the moral high ground. The rule of law has been traduced. The state cannot act as judge and executioner. We are destroying the very values we are supposedly defending.
And the moderate center-Right have happily ushered them up there. OK, this may be a legally grey area. But the practicalities of defending the realm some times supersede the principles. The end justifies the means.
It happens time and time and time again. The Left wraps itself in the warm, heavy cloak of morality. And those on the centre-Right opt for the ugly and superficial undergarments of pragmatism.
It has to stop. The killing of Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin was – probably – legally correct. As ever, there are differing viewpoints. But the balance of independent legal opinion I have read supports the government’s stance.
But even if it wasn’t legally correct, it was morally correct. These men were Isil fighters. We know this because they told us they were. They posed for photos. The issued statements. They posted videos.
This is a key point. It is morally okay to kill people in a war – that is how you stop them killing you. It would be better not to be at war, but when the other side is determined to wage war at you, you need to fight back. And war is no longer something that just happens between nation states.
Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin were modern day Nazis. They were willing members of the one of the most evil, barbaric, sadistic organizations ever to exist on our planet. Stopping them from continuing their campaign of barbarism was our moral duty.
There is an argument that they may be worse than the Nazis. Not in terms of their death toll to date, but in terms of their willing public embrace of evil. The Nazis tried to cover up and deny the Holocaust as they knew it was wrong. ISIL publicly promotes every act of evil they undertake.
Yes, Gary. Our enlightenment values do mean that when confronted by people who adopt mass rape, torture and murder as their hobbies, we stop them. If we can arrest them, great. But if we can’t, we’re going to have to just kill them. And when we do kill them, that is not evidence we are “just as bad as them”. It’s evidence that we are better than them.
A drone strike against an ISIL fighter, when it is the only way to stop them is not the same thing as flying a plane into the Twin Towers. But to some on the radical left, it is.
Actually, it’s not just the hard-Left’s righteous arrogance and own moral hypocrisy that is so staggering. It’s the fundamental lack of humanity.
We saw this most graphically illustrated during the row over Jeremy Corbyn’s comments on how the death of Bin Laden was a “tragedy”. The hard-Left tied itself in knots tying to rationalize and legitimize this statement. He’d been talking about the cycle of violence it had perpetrated. He’d been specifically referring to the fact that Bin Laden had not been brought to trial.
Perhaps he was. But he didn’t merely say Bin Laden’s killing was “counterproductive”. Or “misguided”. Or “a missed opportunity to bring him to justice”. When asked to respond to the death of one of history’s worst mass murderers he instinctively reached for the word “tragedy”.
Exactly. There are many words you could use to describe Bin Laden’s death, but tragedy should never be one of them.