A ‘right to terrorism’
: The abhorrent Ted Honderich strikes again, arguing that the Palestinians have a right to terrorism — and that a terrorist human bomb who kills an Israeli child is exercising that right. He said this in a lecture at the University of Leipzig. David Kaspar’s new blog reports on it. Find Honderich’s full text here.
On the question of the morality of a Palestinian human bomb killing an Israel child, Honderich says this:
… the Palestine suicide bomber does have a moral right to her act of terrorism, and … the Israeli in the helicopter has no moral right to his act of state-terrorism. To clarify any such assertion of a moral right, this one comes to this: the Palestinian suicide-bomber was morally permitted if not obliged to do what she did, which very judgement has the support of a fundamental and accepted moral principle.
He then launches into an odd lecture about the moral superiority of Germany after the Holocaust:
The Germans are now rightly known for taking on themselves the guilt of their fathers. They have a kind of moral superiority not shared by all of the rest of us. The Holocaust was not the first or last genocide in history. Other perpetrators have not been so ready to accept and to deal with guilt. It is for this reason of moral superiority that Germans now have a special obligation to speak against a rape. They will be heard a little more than other nations. There is a reason for their being heard, which is their standing. This moral position is also the reason of their silence until now. They can do more than the rest of us to awaken America from its ignorant trance.
