How to Keep Your Head While President Bush is Losing His

You see and hear it everywhere around you, every day, a nagging double standard that confounds one's attempt to grasp current events and leaves one's mind numb and perhaps even resigned to the follies of one's fellow men. The justice of Saddam Hussein's downfall is erased by American compromise with his ilk in Fallujah, Baghdad, Tehran, and Damascus, which has only ensured more chaos, destruction, and death.

Recently, a pregnant Jewish woman and her four daughters, ages 2 to 11, were gunned down near a settlement by Palestinian killers. The incident received negligible or no coverage in the press. But, when Israeli troops, in pursuit of terrorists, kill or wound "innocent" Palestinian bystanders, including rock-throwing children, the news media immediately wallow in spectacles of commiseration with the grieving relatives, while the White House admonishes Israel for endangering the "peace process."

The U.S. is excoriated in the media worldwide for the abuse of Iraqi POWs, a contemptible anomaly in American behavior for which it is self-flagellating itself, with much assistance from news anchors who can barely contain their sanctimonious glee at the chance to point accusing fingers at America.

But there is little or no mention of torture, rape, mutilation, and murder as a matter of policy in all Muslim countries of their own citizens, nor much mention of or stress on the torture, murder and mutilation of American POWs by Iraqis, nor on the deliberate targeting of Americans and other Westerners for murder and brutality. Does anyone still remember Daniel Pearl? The four murdered private contractors? The brave Italian truck driver who defied his insurgent killers? The hundreds murdered in Bali and in Madrid?

An assistant professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history from Columbia University, Joseph A. Massad, spouts Hitlerian calls for the extinction of Jews in general and of Israel in particular without risk of reprimand or firing by his ivy league employer. Massad not only calls for a jihad against Israel, which he accuses of committing "genocide" against Palestinians, but against America, and not only in guest speeches at venues such as Oxford University, but also in his own classes at Columbia.

However, if someone lets slip that the "Palestinian" people is a recent invention with no connection with a country that never existed (Palestine), and that they are the stateless refugees and the descendents of refugees from Muslim countries, such as Jordan, that do not want them back -- indeed, use them as a tool with which to destroy Israel -- he is branded as a "racist" propagating "hate," "intolerance," and an advocate of the genocide of the "Palestinians."

Retired news anchor Walter Cronkite will speak in May at commencement ceremonies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, together with Bernardine Dohrn, "Clinical Associate Professor of Law" at Northwestern University. Dohrn is a former terrorist and member of the "Weather Underground," which fomented violence at the 1968 Chicago Democratic national convention, bombed the Capitol and the Pentagon, and performed numerous crimes such as armed robbery and property destruction.

In 1969 the future professor of law also hailed the murders of Sharon Tate and seven others by the Charles Manson gang with a victory sign and verbal approval. Her planning role in the Weather Underground's crimes, which she has never regretted or repudiated, should have earned her at least a life sentence; she did seven months on a technicality. But, she is an "associate professor" and will speak to college graduates, and doubtless Pitzer College will not need to spend money on special security arrangements to ensure her safety and right to speak.

Meanwhile, let a career Mideast scholar such as Daniel Pipes try to speak on invitation in Canada or at Berkeley about the war on terror -- provided he is even invited -- and special security must be hired and his potential audience searched for weapons. Even then, he will risk being shouted down by Arab students and other anti-American cliques and organizations. Or his appearance will simply be cancelled by university authorities because they are afraid to guarantee his freedom of speech at the risk of offending the campus "Arab Street" -- in this country.

The instances are innumerable and could fill a thousand-page book. You learn of them in the news media, in newspapers, in magazines. And if your mind isn't numbed by the contradictions spawned by the apparent double standard, if it hasn't surrendered to the gray world of the unknowable and shorted out in the effort to comprehend, you may ask yourself the question: Why are not the people who hate us, who want to destroy us, held to the same standards that we hold to ourselves?

You might tell yourself: If I murdered a pregnant woman and her daughters, murdered and mutilated fellow Americans, called publicly for the genocide of the Jews, or was indicted for having planned armed robberies and mayhem, I would be sitting in jail today, and deservedly. A judge and jury would rightfully have thrown the book at me if I had committed a single one of those crimes. But, it seems that if these crimes are committed in the name of some politics or collectivist movement, then they're permissible. Evil suddenly becomes the good. Or at least the tolerable, beyond judgment.

What, then, does that make me, a rational, honest, productive, hard-working individual? Evil? In whose eyes?

You further reason that if those crimes are permissible -- that is, sanctioned or ignored by the authorities, by the intellectuals, by teachers, by everyone charged with the responsibility of defending your life, liberty, and happiness -- then your life is in jeopardy, and you could become the next victim of some terrorists' "political statement," and forgotten before you have been buried.

Not likely to happen? Daniel Pipes asks you to consider this: a Dutch newspaper, NRC Handelsblad, tabulated the number of incidents since 9/11 attributable to the Islamic declaration of war on the West -- 393 -- with 7,085 dead and 10,132 wounded. These figures do not include all the terrorist attacks within Israel, and are exclusive of the 3,000 Americans murdered on 9/11.

Every one of these assaults and murders was committed in the name of political-religious hegemony, by individuals and state-sponsored terrorists dedicated to destroying your life, liberty and happiness. These forces are not hamstrung by double standards. They are motivated by one standard only: your submission, or your death.

Given the Bush administration's uncertain and contradictory prosecution of the war on terrorism, the chances are very good that you are next.

It isn't simply a matter of double standards. These phenomena point to a more serious, fundamental problem, which is the absence or conscious banishment of reason from a broad spectrum of human affairs by those who take it upon themselves to manage or report such affairs. And the means of its banishment and the rise of double standards and blatant hypocrisy is a two-headed hydra: altruism, and collectivism, aided and abetted by pragmatism and relativism.

Reason would have required that Israel be free to hunt down and exterminate that woman's and daughter's killers -- indeed, to defend itself against Palestinian terrorism and all the cut-throat regimes that surround it; that the murderers of Daniel Pearl, the contractors, and the Italian truck driver and of so many more be hunted down and exterminated; that Professor Massad be fired from the faculty; and that Bernardine Dohrn be boycotted or dis-invited to address a graduating class that may not know of her complicity in domestic terrorism.

If reason is the life-affirming means of man's survival, then its absence in his actions and policies is his death-assuring guarantee.

Perhaps the best advice on how to deal with "double standards" and their roots was given by philosopher Ayn Rand, who wrote: "Don't bother to examine a folly; ask only what it accomplishes."

To paraphrase Rudyard Kipling, "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs," then the repeated follies of men who banish reason from their minds will never tempt you to lose yours.

Cartoons by Cox and Forkum.

Edward Cline is a novelist who has written on the revolutionary war period. He is author of the Sparrowhawk series of novels set in England and Virginia in the Revolutionary period, the detective novel First Prize, the suspense novel Whisper the Guns, and of numerous published articles, book reviews and essays.