Grievance Logic Kills

What range of moral entitlements does victimhood provide? After the death of George Floyd, massive destruction followed. How many buildings should have been burned? How many injuries and deaths were justified? Osama Bin Laden felt entitled to orchestrate the murder of 3,000 Americans because US troops had been on Saudi soil (to defend Saudis) and because Christians ended Muslim rule in Spain.

Irish Catholics have centuries of real grievances against England, so how many IRA bombings are justified? And as I asked in another comment thread, did the unfairness of the terms of the 1919 Versailles Treaty imposed on Germany justify the invasion of Poland and the Holocaust? And do Jews have a blank check to kill Germans? Native Americans a right to scalp others?

Apologists for horrific instances of Palestinian terrorism invariably point to the standing political grievance against the presence of a Jewish state as justification. Is it just me, or does that also strike you as a moral non sequitur?

Justification of wrongdoing on the grounds of class or ethnic historical grievance is dangerous as well as stupid. The replacement of substantive, well-grounded moral philosophy with the moral preening of intersectional grievance promotion has created a class of people utterly incapable of recognizing the specific moral inversion of Islam whose adherents are inoculated against natural revulsion at atrocities perpetrated against non-believers. A religion crafted as an entitled instrument of a religious empire married to grievance culture is a Frankensteinian engine of violence and horror. Hamas is now Exhibit A. And much of our college-educated class is blind to that.

Israelis have a morally justified mission that must be carried out as justly as possible, which is what they appear to be attempting. That is quite difficult from commiting grossly unjust acts and claiming the sins of others make it right, as Hamas did. It takes a seriously malformed intellect to see those as equivalent approaches or that the latter is morally superior. But grievance logic has launched a still-spreading brain-killing pandemic.