From Townhall.com: [url]www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/[/url]
Most people have to deal with the reality that confronts them. They start with that reality and try to do the best they can within its limitations and within their own limitations.
But there are large and growing numbers of people -- especially among the intelligentsia -- whose starting point is some abstraction that they wish to apply to reality. For example, even in the face of a worldwide terrorist organization that has declared open warfare on every American man, woman and child, those whose starting point is abstraction focus on the "civil rights" of terrorists.
No one in World War II worried about Hitler's or Goering's civil rights. The very concept would have been considered absurd. Hitler and Goering were not part of our civil world. In fact, they were trying to destroy that world and replace it with their own tyranny. That is exactly what the world terrorist networks are trying to do today.
How can anyone have rights within a framework that he rejects and is trying to destroy? Rights are not just abstractions plucked out of thin air. Rights are part of a whole set of mutual obligations binding people together. If enemy soldiers have any rights, it is as a result of international agreements such as the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war. And they have those rights only after they have surrendered and become prisoners of war.
So long as they are still fighting, enemy soldiers do not even have the right to live, without which all other rights are meaningless. If these enemy soldiers have infiltrated wearing civilian clothes or disguised in the uniform of some other country, then they can be killed legally, even after surrendering. Spies have been shot or hanged for centuries.
At one time, all this would have been considered too obvious to require saying. But today, when some people talk blithely about "animal rights," as if animals were part of some system of mutual obligations, even the obvious has to be explained to some of the products of our dumbed-down education.
(cont'd)