"Extremist Muslims' belief that their way is right and everyone else is wrong and is immoral is the same as that of the twisted Christian fundamentalists who have bombed gay venues in Atlanta and London, who seek to ban gay parades in Belfast. . ." So wrote Morgan Carpenter to this newspaper the other day, writes Kevin Myers.
I'm not sure whether Morgan is a man or a woman, and it matters only in the pronoun that s/he uses. But is s/he serious? Does s/he really believe that an attempt to ban a gay parade in Belfast is the same as murdering 50 people in London, 200 in Madrid and 3,000 in New York? Because - speaking for myself, that is; Morgan might have different opinions on this - I think I'd rather be simply banned from walking down a street on a particular day than be blown to pieces all over it at any time.
Moreover, one cannot reasonably compare one isolated bombing at a gay bar in Atlanta in 1997 by a lunatic (who also bombed an abortion clinic in Alabama) or the isolated bombing of another gay bar in London in 1999, with two dead, by another lunatic, with the worldwide explosion of genocidal hate in recent years. Or can s/he? It's hard to say. Given the culture of moral equivalence which has swept through our bien-pensant classes, in which a perceived insult to one's sexuality registers pretty much the same on the offensiveness scale as a railway carriage full of dead bodies, who knows?
Nobody represents the showbiz side of moral equivalence more than Jane Fonda. What is perhaps most unnerving about her is the way she can talk of herself, often in the third person, with such voluble and fascinated indefatigability. She clearly believes she is as interesting as China and as wise as Socrates. Close, actually: in fact, as interesting as a china plate (but cracked) and as wise as a sock.
Jane announced the other day that she is going to tour the US calling for an end to the American military presence in Iraq. Apparently determined to show us that not merely has she the face of a macaque, but the mind of one also, she proudly boasts she's going to travel in a bus that runs on vegetable oil. That'll go down well in Iraq. Not merely will she be demanding the withdrawal of the only force which is stopping the country from slipping into a catastrophic civil war, she's not even going to use any of Iraq's oil in the process.
However, this is not necessarily all bad news. The discovery that they have Jane Fonda on their side should thin the ranks of the anti-war crowd considerably. Certainly, if I was in the last lifeboat from the Titanic and I found her leering at me from the stern with her little bottle of vegetable oil, I think I'd take my chances in the water.
She - like many others, especially in this country - has not grasped a central feature of the war in Iraq. The US-led coalition is only present in that country by the invitation and legal authorisation of the democratically elected government there. Moreover, what we see happening in that country is truly Manichean, which is what she probably thinks is something that happens to your nails when you go to your beautician: no, Janey, in this case, it is a struggle of the forces of good, of law and of popular will against the greatest evil the world has seen since the Fall of Berlin.
Five years ago, such evil was not merely unpredicted but entirely unpredictable. No one in the world would have foreseen the day when hundreds of suicide bombers would be eagerly lining up to kill their fellow Muslims, which is what we now see in Iraq. Not even the most pessimistic prophet could have imagined that a suicide bomber would blow 30 Arab children to pieces because they were queuing up to get sweets from US soldiers. Nor would anyone have believed that images of conscious people being slowly beheaded, from the neck to the spine, would be fed around the world on the internet, to audiences eager to do the same.
In the past five years we have passed more thresholds in our understanding of the nature of human depravity than we had in the previous 50; and believe me, Morgan, not being able to march in a gay pride parade in Belfast wasn't one of them. For the US and its allies to do a Spanish runner and get out of Iraq now because of a terrorist campaign in London, or even a vegetable-oil-driven bus campaign by Jane Fonda across the US, frightening though both are, would simply be to surrender the very keystone of regional and world stability to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his merry men.
There is no choice here. Hey, you, in the bus that smells like a chip-van: can you not understand this? The world is at war, and the consequence of an insurgent victory in Iraq would be a geopolitical calamity that could exceed in all its abominable gravity the consequences of the Bolshevik Revolution, the mother of all catastrophes in the 20th century.