….Kwame Anthony Appiah, the New York Times ethics advice columnist, gives a rambling, barely-responsive and contradictory answer that only reaches the obvious conclusion after downing the issue in verbiage. The question:

I’m a dual Swedish and American citizen and have lived in Sweden for the past five years, with no plans on moving back to the United States. I have a Swedish husband, pay Swedish taxes and vote in Swedish elections.

I still maintain my American citizenship and file taxes in the United States every year. But I’ve made a choice not to vote in U.S. elections. Because I no longer live (or plan to live) in the States, I don’t think I should have a say in selecting its government.

I have expat friends who strongly disagree. They all vote and think that I should. What’s your take?

Easy, easy call. It is unethical to vote. Not living in the nation for five years, the inquirer cannot possibly be sufficiently aware of U.S. conditions, culture or public needs. Not intending to return to the U.S., the inquirer has no serious stake in the outcome of the election either. For the writer to vote in the U.S. would be like me being allowed to vote in Massachusetts elections when I haven’t lived there for years. The “expat” friends are wrong, and frankly, warped. I’ve had experience with Americans who are in the foreign service and seldom even visit the U.S. I found them to be culturally estranged from the nation I know, arrogant, detached, and biased. In fact, it is a serious problem that many of the people who represent the U.S. abroad no longer understand the nation they represent.

But I digress. Launching into long-winded equivocal academic mode, “The Ethicist” waxes on about whether one should have to pay taxes to have a vote, the wisdom of allowing people who aren’t citizens or have been convicted of a crime to vote, and “Does having made a contribution to your country over a period mean that you should be allowed to vote even after you’ve retired to another country?”, he finally proclaims, “A reasonable conclusion is that people granted the legal right to vote are morally free to exercise it.” Oh, shut up, man! The question wasn’t whether the inquirer had a right to vote or should have a right to vote. The question is whether it is ethical to vote under the conditions listed in the question!

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Brilliant.

Saying you “stand” with someone represented by a figure who isn’t standing. Referring to “Palestine,” when there is no such country to stand “with.”

And, of course, proclaiming solidarity with a terrorist group that just slaughtered innocent people.

Some of us realized that Black Lives Matter is an irresponsible, racist, violent and crooked movement run by despicable people from the very beginning. The latest example is no surprise.

One minor source of satisfaction from BLM’s fatuous “statement of solidarity” with Hamas: my silly neighbor who has inflicted on our neighborhood a large Black Lives Matter display on her front lawn for almost three years quietly took the eyesore down.

When are all the groveling politicians, corporations and organizations who proclaimed their support for these “social justice” scamsters going to take similar action?

This isn’t a disagreement or a dispute over values. The response of progressives, academia, the mainstream media, Democrats and others in the now fully-dysfunctional American Left is a symptom of underlying ethics rot, the product of too many factors accumulating over decades. At what point will U.S. voters and reasonable citizens finally conclude, after so much evidence before this: “Run away!”? Well, we shall see.

Rather than recap how progressives got here, it is more useful—and easier—to show where they are. As Robert Spenser wrote this morning, “What kind of sickness overtakes people that they can see what the “Palestinian” jihadis did to innocent people on Saturday and think, “I’ve got to speak out in support of the attackers,” or even worse, ‘I’ve got to give those people some money’? It’s a rhetorical question. The sickness is Marxist, leftist cant and indoctrination, and it is as obvious on progressives and Democrats—and the news media, of course—as the buboes on a plague victim.

The ugly tell in this instance is the proclamation of a false equivalency between Hamas and Israel after Hamas launched a full-scale terrorist attack against civilians three days ago. The partner to that intellectually and ethically untenable delusion is that a ceasefire should immediately follow: Hamas attacks, slaughters, kidnaps, and Israel is asked to show “restraint.” To the contrary, Israel has promised to wipe Hamas from the face of the Earth. Bingo. That is the ethical response, completely and unequivocally. Israel has shown restraint, and this was its reward. (I’m waiting for Sonny Hostin or some other idiot to explain that Israel ‘turning the other cheek’ is the Christian thing to do.)

Let’s see:

1. 31 Harvard student organizations collectively published a letter entitled, “Joint Statement by Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the Situation in Palestine,” including Harvard’s affiliate of Amnesty International. The unforgivable letter starts, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

“Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” it continues. “For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to ‘open the gates of hell,’ and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced. Palestinians in Gaza have no shelters for refuge and nowhere to escape. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence.”

As they should. Who is responsible when a population elects a terrorist organization as its lawful government? Former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers wrote that he was “sickened” by the failure of Harvard’s leadership to condemn the statement. “The silence from Harvard’s leadership, so far, coupled with a vocal and widely reported student groups’ statement blaming Israel solely, has allowed Harvard to appear at best neutral towards acts of terror against the Jewish state of Israel,” tweeted Summers. That’s right, but Summers was also complicit in turning Harvard into the one-view ideological indoctrination factory that it has become.

2. Hilariously, Biden’s Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, desperately hustling to stem the bleeding after a vicious attack by Iran-sponsored Hamas quickly followed on the heels of his addled boss unfreezing $6 billion for Iran, tweeted a call for a cease-fire, then pulled the tweet after a backlash that any fool could have predicted, and had his own Department disavow his tweet as “unauthorized.” So now it’s up to the media propaganda hacks to cover for Biden and Blinken. On “Meet the Press,” new host Kristen Welker parroted Blinken’s statement that the $6 billion was not a factor in the attacks. Luckily, Nikki Haley was on hand to debunk that talking point, saying, “When I was at the United Nations…when those planes full of cash [were] sent by Obama to Iran,…What happened was those funds were sent to Hezbollah and Lebanon. They were sent to Hamas and Gaza. They were sent to the Houthis in Yemen. They go and spread terrorism every time they get a dollar.”

And Biden released the billions anyway.

3. CNN featured a guest who claimed, without contradiction, that Hamas had really only targeted “military installations” and that most hostages were soldiers. Appearing on Fareed Zarakia GPS, Mustafa Marghouti also insisted the attacks were the fault of Israel because of “the longest occupation in modern history” and “[a] much worse apartheid” than the one “in South Africa.” Showing that American journalism could get even worse, The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation instructed its reporters not to refer to the Hamas terrorists who attacked innocent civilians, kidnapped those they did not kill and are threatening to murder them on live TV as “terrorists.” The CBC’s Director of Journalistic Standards, George Achi, stated, “Do not refer to militants, soldiers, or anyone else as ‘terrorists. The notion of terrorism remains highly politicized and is part of the story. Even when quoting/clipping a government or a source referring to fighters as ‘terrorists,’ we should add context to ensure the audience understands this opinion, not fact.” The New York Times isn’t calling them terrorists either: its euphemism of choice at the moment is “militants.”

See Rationalization #64, “It isn’t what it is.”

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