The American Spectator

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THE SIRENS OF SUICIDE are viewed in much the same light. "She is a hero. She is a martyr," brayed the mother of Palestinian suicide bomber Wafa Idris. These people are proud of the ghastly deeds they say their faith commands. They demonstrate no consciousness of guilt nor do they exhibit the urge to adorn their barbarism with a respectable pedigree. That's the job of patronizing Western liberals. "In dealing with crime," wrote political philosopher Murray Rothbard, "liberals are concentrating on the wrong root causes. That is, on 'poverty' or 'child abuse' instead of a rotten immoral character."

Nothing causes ordinary Palestinians to strap on belts of razor blades and dynamite and then blow up innocent Israelis. And nothing causes ordinary Israelis to not respond in kind. These are respective choices. Since so many Palestinians choose to commit evil, liberals invariably attribute their actions (after obligatory and perfunctory denunciations) to Israeli-engendered oppression. Since just about no Israeli civilians respond in kind, liberals fail to credit their moral choices. Similarly, Lisa Montgomery has reasons -- not causes -- for killing Bobby Jo Stinnett and stealing her child.

The philosopher and distinguished psychiatrist Viktor Frankl said this of his experience in Auschwitz: "In the camps one lost everything, except the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." You can see why liberals have always preferred Freud to Frankl. They retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian idea that traumatic toilet training is destiny.

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