Moral Equivalence

 17/11/2023, 07:38 The Australian

Calling out Hamas evil demands moral clarity - HENRY ERGAS

Growing up in the shadow of the Second World War, I knew what an existential battle for survival meant. That war had been no ordinary contest. It was a struggle against an adversary so monstrous that the consequences of its final victory were literally beyond calculation. The laws of war required the suffering on the two sides to be constantly weighted – painfully, dreadfully, as the bombing of Dresden and the use of the atomic bomb brought home with stomach-wrenching force. But the enormity of the horrors that would have accompanied the Allies’ defeat ruled out easy judgments. There were no ready scales for comparing the harm a military decision could inflict on innocent civilians against the overbearing significance of freeing humanity from regimes that were the very embodiment of radical evil. When those regimes’ complete destruction finally wrenched a chance of peace out of the rubble of broken cities and the misery of broken lives, the world thought it had drawn the lessons. 

The United Nations, US president Harry Truman declared at the organisation’s founding conference, would “provide the machinery which will make future peace not only possible but certain”. And empowered by a newly established International Court of Justice, international law would be given the means to hold those who committed “crimes against the peace” accountable, removing the need for individual countries to wage punitive war. But the god of our dreams is also the god of our nightmares. From the slaughter fields of Ukraine to the charnel house that is Syria, those aspirations have gone up in flames. As the UN descends into irrelevance, the laws of war, which were intended to protect the innocent, are being used to shelter the terrorists who deliberately place them at risk. 

Hailed as a triumph of civilisation, they have become a tool facilitating barbarism’s relentless advance. That leaves the people of Israel once again facing the fearfulness, the sense of danger, the perception of the struggle’s ultimate character, which pervaded the memories in which I was raised. Like Hitler, Hamas has never hidden its genocidal intentions: the opening passage of its Covenant says “Israel will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it”. And in one of his most authoritative texts, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, its recently deceased spiritual leader, wrote: “The latest punishment of the Jews was by Hitler; the next, with the help of Allah, will come from the Muslims.” Those goals have been there for all to see; what Hamas proved on October 7 was that for so long as its military capabilities remained intact, it would relentlessly pursue its interpretation of the Koran’s command to “plant terror in the heart of the enemies of Allah”, eroding, to the breaking point, the viability of Israelis’ daily lives. None of that implies the Palestinians have no grievances; but the Germans had their grievances too. It was, for example, undeniable that there were large German majorities in both the Sudetenland and Danzig, the crisis points of 1938 and 1939. When the Nazis demanded those territories, their claims were, much like Hamas’, couched – and this was the pretence – in the respectable language of self-determination. The London Times, in endorsing appeasement, had no difficulty in describing them as “justified by ethics and policy”. 

It was, however, a grotesque illusion to believe – as the appeasers did – that because no “government with the interests of its own people at heart would expose them to the horrors of war”, a territorial concession here, a bit more power there, would avoid “the ultimate evil of a general conflict”. For the Nazis’ goal was never a greater share of the pie; it was, exactly like the Islamists, to inaugurate, over the charred bodies of their adversaries, a new millennium. Moved not by want but by hate, they had no real interest in agreements, regarding them as mere tactics, all the better to subjugate the enemy. Hamas, which believes “Jews, who are by their nature liars, cannot keep a contract”, has felt free to breach every agreement it has ever entered into; the Nazis’ ethics, if one can call them that, were no better. Confronting them required moral clarity – the moral clarity to distinguish radical evil, which endangers everything that is decent in this world of ours, from ordinary enmity. Instead, the appeasers, by conjuring a moral equivalence between victims and executioners, sowed the confusion that  made the cataclysm all the more certain. 

Today, moral confusion yet again fills the air. And our government, far from correcting the confusion, compounds it – by repeatedly claiming, for example, that Israel, as a democracy, should be “held to a higher standard” than its adversaries. It is, however, surely obvious that the demands of morality do not depend on the nature of a regime: to believe the Holocaust was any less of a crime because it was committed by a dictatorship is so plainly contrary to moral principle and international law as to be absurd. But the “higher standard” claim was never intended to withstand intelligent scrutiny. A weapon disguised as a platitude, it smuggled in a double standard: one for Israel, another for Hamas. And by transforming the virtue of being a democracy into a vice, it served to justify the singleminded focus on Israel, which obscures, if it does not entirely occlude, the atrocities Hamas commits day after day, including by indiscriminately shelling Israeli homes, schools and hospitals. The babies in the hospitals of Gaza, who are the unintentional victims of a legitimate military operation, count; those in the hospitals of Israel, who are the intentional victims of terror attacks, don’t. No less egregious is the constant pairing of vicious anti-Semitism with the taunts some Muslim women have experienced for wearing hijabs. Those taunts are utterly despicable; but an abyss separates their severity from the menaces that have forced the Jewish community to guard creches, schools and synagogues from potentially deadly attack. To pretend otherwise is not merely foolish: by placing murderous rage on a par with ordinary stupidity, it trivialises – and hence excuses – the Jew-hating fury that disgraces our streets. 

The government argues that it is being even-handed, so as not to deepen current divisions. But its lack of clarity has the opposite effect: by relentlessly blurring the line between right and wrong, it gives Hamas’s supporters a legitimacy they do not deserve, fuelling the radicalisation that is tearing us apart. In the end, national unity demands moral direction, not moral equivocation. So too does our ability to face the future, for the unhinging of the nation’s moral compass doesn’t merely extinguish the courage to speak the truth: it erases the courage needed to see it. In a world that is far from being at peace, and where devastating cataclysms are not simply the painful memories of the old but looming threats to the young, that doesn’t just blind – it kills.

EV issues

 Subsidies for electric vehicles are a huge mistake. 

These cars are conceptually the same battery and motor as a fourth-grade science project—not a great innovation. And given high prices for EVs, subsidies are mainly a giveaway to the already welloff. If you add up carbon emissions from manufacturing, daily use and end of life, EVs have total life-cycle emissions 30% lower than gasoline-powered autos. In Silicon Valley, something is considered truly transformational if it’s 10 times better, not a third. And now there’s a glut of them. Ford is losing billions, and Honda and General Motors have scrapped plans to build affordable EVs. Instead of throwing taxpayer money at EVs, President Biden could have been a hero and helped bring autonomous vehicles to the market faster. Why? Start with the 42,795 traffic fatalities last year. Costbenefit analysis involves something called the Value of Statistical Life, and the Transportation Department uses $12.5 million per traffic death. Lowering annual crash fatalities to 10,000 would be worth $400 billion to the U.S. economy every year. Technology seriously reduces driver error, a cause of many accidents. Another reason? With fully autonomous vehicles, the U.S. would need only half of its Autonomous Cars Beat EVs nearly 300 million cars. Most sit around doing nothing. Transportation as a service would become reality—no need to own cars; simply click and a driverless one shows up when you need it. That would mean way less emissions and no parking hassle or road rage. So what’s the problem? Tesla’s Full Self-Driving capability, priced at up to $300 a month, still runs stop signs. The company uses simple CMOS image sensors, like those in an iPhone, instead of more-expensive Lidar pulsed lasers. Teslas get confused and sometimes run into emergency vehicles with flashing lights. I recently rode in a Model 3 in self-driving mode that botched a simple yield. It has been a bad few weeks for autonomous driving. Selfdriving taxis from Cruise and Waymo in San Francisco halt at unexpected construction barriers. Or at least they used to. GM’s Cruise cars had their California driverless permit revoked last month after a pedestrian hit by another car was pinned under a driverless Cruise. A rare case, but it did happen. But, even with their problems, a joint study (albeit a very early one) by Alphabetowned Waymo and the insurer Swiss Re showed 95% fewer injuries and 76% less property damage from autonomous driving vs. humans. That’s a preview of 10 times. Auto insurance may force an autonomous shift. Imagine $500 a year for autonomous-car insurance, but $2,000 if you want to drive. The Society of Automotive Engineers defines basic cruise control as Level 1 autonomous. Tesla’s FSD, which still requires human attention, is Level 2 autonomous. Last month, Mercedes announced Drive Pilot, which uses Lidar and is currently the only Level 3 “conditional driving automation” system approved in the U.S. and Europe. Drivers can take their hands off the wheel and eyes off the road, even surf the web, but only while driving less than 40 miles an hour and following another vehicle in dry conditions during the day. What’s needed for an economic transformation is Level 4: autonomous driving at all speeds in clear weather. Level 5 is self-driving even in rain, snow and fog. What can government do? Help the imaging systems in cars, which will never be totally accurate, by actively letting them know where things are. Stop signs could emit signals with their GPS locations. Traffic lights could digitally broadcast red, yellow and green. Digital signal transmitters in highway markings— dotted line, solid line, etc.— would digitally paint the road. Car sensors could see the real signs or paint and confirm them digitally. Ambulances and police cars could broadcast their locations and warn others to slow down and stay away. Construction barriers and traffic cones could broadcast their location and indicate how long they will be there to help cars update their maps. Cars could even negotiate who gets to go first at a four-way stop sign. Encrypted signals would prevent hacking. Don’t confuse this with smart cities or smart roads, the dreams of central planners. The Silicon Valley adage works here: Intelligence moves out to the edge of the network. Make cars smart, and roads dumb but digitally visible. Expensive? Back-of-the-envelope math: There are 4 million miles of road in the U.S., with perhaps 10 to 25 signs per mile. So we need to update 100 million metal signs and 300,000 traffic lights. I’ll assume the cost of sign transmitters is $100 and roadmarking transmitters to paint the lines digitally is $10 for every tenth of a mile. Even if I’m off by a factor of 10, the government could spend less than $400 billion to save 32,000 lives a year, reduce emissions, lower capital costs of transportation, and transform the U.S. economy. That sure beats subsidizing the EV purchases of climate-smug rich folks. The cost of EVs and batteries was going to fall anyway without handouts. It would have been better to spend that money making autonomous driving viable. What a waste. Write to kessler@wsj.com