Bret Stephens averts his eyes.
THE WORST THING WE READ™
Gaza, the Obscene Spectacle
OBSCENITY IS NOT really something you can argue about. It is, notoriously, a would-be objective claim about a subjective question. Someone has supposedly violated the collective standards of decency—yet how collective, or standard, can those collective standards be, if that person felt free to violate them?
Nevertheless, Bret Stephens knows when propriety has been broken. "The Charges Against Israel Are a Moral Obscenity," the headline on his column in today's New York Times declared. The charges at issue—that stand as a moral obscenity, as opposed to one of the kinds of obscenities that don't involve morals—are those filed by South Africa with the United Nations' International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of committing "breaches of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide" in its ongoing assault on Gaza.
It was the accusation of genocide, not the mass slaughter of a trapped and subjugated civilian population, that aroused Stephens' moral indignation. "It's obscene because..." he repeated as the opening of a half-dozen different paragraphs, straining for the power of litany. The charge before the court, he wrote "politicizes our understanding of genocide...puts the wrong party in the dock...validates Hamas’s illegal and barbaric strategy of hiding between, behind and beneath Palestinian civilians..."
How does one politicize an inherently political crime? Stephens wasn't stopping to consider logic or details, not even the details of his own complaint about the complaint.
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