Posted on 12/02/2004 5:34:18 AM PST by Jose Roberto
The United Nations' decision last week not to condemn the Sudanese government for genocide against its black Christian population did not surprise me, but it did make me think.
How many times have we heard that the problem with the world today is that there isn't enough love? In fact, precisely the opposite is true.
Evil currently stalks the earth because there isn't enough hate. Time was when moral people felt positively repulsed by evil and harnessed their energies to defeat it.
Indeed, the history of the modern world is a history of genocide and the indiscriminate slaughter of innocents. Historian Paul Johnson estimates that at least 100 million civilians were murdered in the 20th century alone by tyrants. All too many of the murderers, like Pol Pot and Idi Amin, died comfortably in their sleep rather than on the gallows, where they belonged.
The world could not summon enough hatred of these men or their actions to stop their killing and bring them to justice.
Hatred is only evil when it is directed at the good and at the innocent. It is positively Godly when it is directed at cold-blooded killers, motivating us to fight and eradicate them before more decent people die. Because Churchill hated Hitler, he inspired a nation to oppose him. Those French who did not hate Hitler collaborated with him instead.
Loving victims alone might generate compassion for their suffering. But hating their persecutors might generate action to stop an orgy of murder. To people who say they consciously fight the tendency to hate murderers like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi – "lest we become like him" – I have this question: What is more beneficial for mankind – to use your energy to fight your hatred or to use it to fight evil?
What is worse, harboring hatred in your heart or granting murderers safe harbor?
Exhortations to hate all manner of evil abound in the Bible. The Book of Proverbs declares, "The fear of the Lord is to hate evil"; and King David proclaims regarding the wicked, "I have hated them with a deep loathing. They are as enemies to me."
But hatred of evil has gone out of fashion because it implies both the right to make judgments, as well as a belief in absolutes, both of which are anathema in a secular age.
While it has some redeeming qualities, my foremost argument against secular liberalism is that it harbors no abhorrence of evil. Indeed, liberals hate war much more than they hate evil. That's why Kofi Annan was prepared to leave Saddam Hussein in power in order to avoid conflict.
The same was true of Annan's incomprehensible order to Lt.-Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the UN commander in Rwanda in 1994, categorically prohibiting him from seizing Hutu arms caches in Kigali, which could have prevented the genocide of nearly a million Tutsis.
But rather than face withering criticism, Annan was elevated to the position of secretary-general.
Annan aside, even many of our Christian brothers and sisters believe that it is wrong to hate murderers. They quote Jesus teaching to turn the other cheek and his admonishment to love your enemies as proof that we dare never hate.
But this interpretation of Jesus's teachings would turn him into someone who had contempt for his victims as he extended love to their murderers. Jesus advocated turning the other cheek to petty slights and affronts to our honor, not to mass graves and torture chambers.
Likewise, while Jesus taught that we ought to love our own enemies, this did not apply to God's enemies.
Our "enemies" are people who are our rivals for a promotion at work. God's enemies are those who slaughter His children.
True, the Bible commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves, but the man who kills children is not our neighbor. Having cast off the image of God, he has lost his divine spark and is condemned to eternal oblivion from which not even a belief in salvation will rescue him.
Those who murder God's children have been lost to Him forever and have abandoned all entitlement to love, earning eternal scorn in its stead.
To love the terrorist who flies a civilian plane into a building is not just scandalous, but sinful. To love evil is itself evil and constitutes a passive form of complicity. True, the Bible says "rejoice not when thine enemy falleth."
But to extend compassion to impenitent and incorrigible monsters is an act of mocking God, who demands unequivocal justice for the innocent. To show kindness to a murderer is to violate the victim yet again.
When Europeans hate George Bush more than they do Saddam Hussein, they are speaking volumes about their own morality and the willingness among some in Europe and at the UN to tolerate the intolerable
Wow - outstanding. This one gets filed for future use.
I agree. This may become a landmark article and really singes and exposes the liberal thought.
How can Kofi Annan look on these murders of black people and do nothing ? Moreover if the US werent tied up in Iraq and we went to help in the Sudan , we would be reviled for it.
It would seem the US and moreover Republicans in the US are the only moral people left in the world.
We seem to be a dying breed.
Good article. I was growing tired of moral relativism.
This is just a spectacular statement.
And if you can't trust Michael Jackson's love guru to tell you what Our Savior actually meant to say, who can you trust?
Because he has chosen to live in the white man's world and profit therefrom?
Outstanding article!!!!!!!
FGS
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