“If I can’t be profound, at least I can be unintelligible.”

That has been the guiding principle of intellectuals on the left, those doughty champions of the masses – note well the crowds of them in Western universities – for at least a hundred years.

Here’s an example of it being followed, not by an academic but a religious obscurantist:

The rule of law is thus not the enshrining of priority for the universal/abstract dimension of social existence but the establishing of a space accessible to everyone in which it is possible to affirm and defend a commitment to human dignity as such, independent of membership in any specific human community or tradition, so that when specific communities or traditions are in danger of claiming finality for their own boundaries of practice and understanding, they are reminded that they have to come to terms with the actuality of human diversity – and that the only way of doing this is to acknowledge the category of ‘human dignity as such’ – a non-negotiable assumption that each agent (with his or her historical and social affiliations) could be expected to have a voice in the shaping of some common project for the well-being and order of a human group.

Thus spake Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, in a recent lecture.

And here, by way of contrast, is a quotation from a genuinely profound thinker, Thomas Sowell. The passage comes from his new book, Intellectuals and Society, and is as clear as a polished pane of glass:

There can be no dependable framework of law where judges are free to impose as law their own individual notions of what is fair, compassionate or in accord with social justice.

We found the whole book a pleasure to read.

With his usual incisive clarity, Thomas Sowell asks:

Since this is an era when many people are concerned about “fairness” and “social justice,” what is your “fair share” of what someone else has worked for?

It would be fascinating to hear a redistributionist’s attempt to answer the question.

This is a way to lose a war –

Stephen Brown writes at Front Page:

It makes one wonder how the West is ever going to win the war against radical Islam. …

Three navy SEALs have been charged for allegedly abusing a terrorist leader they had captured in Iraq last September.

The SEALs’ long-sought target, Ahmed Hashim Abed, is believed to have been the mastermind behind one of the most infamous incidents of the Iraq war: the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater security personnel in Fallujah in 2004. The four men were attacked when transporting supplies and had their bodies burned and dragged through the streets. Two of the corpses were then hung from a Euphrates River bridge.

Abed, the alleged planner of this barbarism, claims the navy’s elite commandos had punched him after his capture and that “he had the bloody lip to prove it.”…

Most right-thinking people would feel that, in the middle of a war, three such brave and highly-skilled warfare specialists, whose expensive training the American taxpayer has funded, should not be facing a demoralizing criminal trial over such a relatively minor matter that may not even have happened.

As far as legality is concerned, terrorists like Abed are lucky to be left among the living after their capture. As conservative columnist Thomas Sowell rightly points out, Islamic terrorists have never followed the Geneva Convention regarding the rules of warfare, as can be easily discerned in the case of the Blackwater security guards alone. More importantly, however, the terrorists themselves are not covered by the Convention’s provisions.

“Neither the Constitution of the United states nor the Geneva Convention gives rights to terrorists who operate outside the law,” writes Sowell.

Legally, under the Convention’s terms, the American military in wartime has the right to shoot any captured enemy not in uniform. Sowell states, “There was a time when everyone understood this” and cites World War Two’s Battle of the Bulge as an example. German troops caught in American uniforms during that battle were shot almost immediately and without trial. Their executions were even filmed and shown years later on American television with no fuss ever made regarding legality.

But in the charges against the three Navy SEALs, one can detect the liberal media’s invisible hand. After the media-induced hysteria about the Abu Ghraib scandal, where American service personnel were rightly punished for subjecting detainees to abuse, some of it no worse than frat party pranks, the American military is supersensitive about the treatment of detainees. It knows the liberal media would love another prisoner mistreatment scandal that can sell papers or earn networks higher ratings as well as simultaneously be used as a stick to beat an American institution it has never liked.

And it is not as if liberals in the media have ever actually cared about Iraqi prisoners. Just the opposite. For 24 years they hypocritically ignored the real suffering of the thousands of people who were tortured and murdered under Saddam Hussein in Abu Ghraib. But that did not stop them from blowing up the scandal involving the American military into something that appeared to merit a second Nuremburg Trials.

This need for scandal that can be turned into a headline, however, has been of greater service to the Islamists in Afghanistan. There, the controversy about civilian deaths caused by American and NATO troops led to a change in their Rules of Engagement (ROE) this year. It is now much more difficult for western forces to drop smart bombs or missiles on targets where civilians may be present. One report states lawyers now have to be consulted and a casualty analysis made before every smart bomb or missile attack. …

Due to the ROE change, one military publication states the Taliban are making greater use of human shields. Taliban fighters spend time in villages or compounds where civilians are present and also bring civilians, whether willing or unwilling, with them as human shields when they go on operations. This has led to their avoiding attacks, in which they earlier would have been killed.

And with the fight becoming more difficult and dangerous for American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, this can only spell bad news.

Thomas Sowell writes against the notion that Obama is a ‘post-racial’ president:

For “community organizers” … racial resentments are a stock in trade. President Obama’s background as a community organizer has received far too little attention, though it should have been a high-alert warning that this was no post-racial figure.

What does a community organizer do? What he does not do is organize a community. What he organizes are the resentments and paranoia within a community, directing those feelings against other communities, from whom either benefits or revenge are to be gotten, using whatever rhetoric or tactics will accomplish that purpose.

To think that someone who has spent years promoting grievance and polarization was going to bring us all together as president is a triumph of wishful thinking over reality.