Naturally and legally, the refugees would be prohibited from entering the United States. Naturally because everyone’s obligation to help is limited; in fact, there is no such obligation at all. Help is commendable while absence thereof is non-condemnable. Legally because every country guards its borders with a visa system. Refugees cannot act criminally: just as they cannot kill border guards and rob stores, they cannot enter the country illegally. Crossing the border illegally is a crime on a par with theft: the migrants steal a valuable franchise—a residence permit.

During WWII, the British prevented Jewish refugees from entering Palestine without visas. Switzerland, the United States, and scores of other countries closed their borders to refugees without visas. Either recognize that policy as criminal and demand reparations from them or accept the harsh legal notion of visas. But once the visa requirement is abandoned for refugees, tens of millions would stream into affluent lands. During the Iran-Iraq war, tens of millions people could have been classified as refugees; Turkey would have been rather unhappy to accept them all.

The process of granting visas separates refugees from economic migrants. Some imagine that Darfurians are refugees; by that token, Dresdeners were also refugees—both started hostilities and suffered from them. But fine, let’s treat them as refugees. But here we have half of Africa streaming into Sinai. If they think themselves refugees—fine, go apply for an Israeli refugee visa in a consulate. No African country borders Israel—the migrants have ample opportunity to apply for visas while in Egypt. Instead, we have here a Robin Hood story: common criminals who pretend to rectify human rights abuses.

Normally, illegal migrants are deported to their home countries. Here we have a situation when they don’t have passports. Any legal proceedings around them are senseless: even in Israeli jails they are far better off than in their home jungles. Leftists have educated the African mob, and they enjoy idleness on charity and governmental funds. Children of African migrants study in Jewish schools: not only do they consume scarce resources (university tuition fees keep rising), but the quality of education declines to accommodate them.

In the worst case, if Israel decides to accommodate the illegal migrants—thus inviting many more of them—why allow them in Tel Aviv, where they occupy bomb shelters which Jews might need badly one day? Drop them in Umm al Fahm, and let Israeli Arabs enjoy their new neighbors.

Where is the UNRWA? Scores of UNRWA personnel are stationed in Israel, and many UNRWA camps are located within Israel and near her borders. Why not dump the Africans in UNRWA camps? This is the very organization which deals with refugees—enjoy. What is the problem with loading them on trucks and driving them into Gaza?

We already have here a hundred thousand Ethiopian Christians and pagans. There is no need for the Jewish state to become a dumping ground for hostile, culturally divergent, economically worthless, HIV-ridden criminals.

Sure, a lot of criticism is leveled against the US unfairly. Though interrogation methods in Guantanamo violated the Geneva rules, those rules were never practiced. No realist can imagine the Allied or Axis military refraining from torturing enemy POWs who were thought to possess valuable information. Indeed, a refusal to torture them would be cruel to one’s own soldiers. Some other allegations against Guantanamo and Bagram were outright silly: the interrogators chained the detainees, abused them verbally, and stripped them. That’s not torture in any meaningful sense. The Americans went so far as to treat the prisoners for clinical depression. Indeed, the Americans offer Israelis a glimpse of normality. Whereas Jews treat jailed Palestinian terrorists to satellite TV, mobile phones, and pocket money, a normal nation’s guards tear the Koran, insult Islamic beliefs, and undress and photograph the Muslims. We can add the suggestion of distributing their naked photos in their hometowns, and offering them pork and wine instead of water. Jewish criminals in American jails cannot get kosher food, why are there better terms for the terrorists?

Treatment of POWs in a war against terrorists is always questionable. There is no need to refuse them Geneva standards: the insistence that soldiers must wear uniforms to be eligible for protection is out of touch with modern realities. Jailed terrorists cannot be treated as common criminals because there is often no hard evidence to convict them; they cannot be presumed innocent. But anti-terrorist wars last for decades, and jailing them for so long a term is unreasonable. The choice is between mutilation and a jail term—but the jail must be harsh compared to the terrorists’ normal living conditions. The horrible way competing mujahedeen groups treat each other’s prisoners offers a benchmark for the West’s treatment of them: presumably, we can rely on the neighbors’ advice.

It will be never known what part oil played in Bush’s calculations, but we know that it was a major thing for Carter. The peace-loving US president launched a brutal civil war because the Soviet Union came “close to the Straits of Hormuz, a waterway through which most of the world’s oil must flow.” Might we assume Bush was no less cynical? Reestablishing an American client state in Afghanistan would mean the US would gain control over the Central Asian oil and gas pipelines, major influence over Pakistan (and therefore on India) and Iran, whose insurgents hide in Afghanistan.

The American war in Afghanistan came at the cost of accepting Pakistani nuclear arsenals. Instead of buying its way into Afghanistan through Tajikistan and ignoring Pakistani sovereignty in occasional overflights, Bush lifted the sanctions against Pakistan. That acceptance of Islamic nuclear weapons was a major factor in Iran’s jump-starting of its nuclear program.

America initially invaded Afghanistan to reestablish its international position and deterrence after 9/11. As the perpetrators were unknown, Al Qaeda was appointed as the culprit and its hosts attacked. A swift, victorious war across the globe could affirm US supremacy. The fact that the superpower failed against cavemen is a slap in its face; never mind that the previous two superpowers were slapped similarly. During the course of the Afghan war, America lost its base in Uzbekistan and its relations with Pakistan soured, hardly adding to its international prestige. The obvious parallel with the recent Soviet defeat will haunt the United States in the Muslim world for decades to come.

In a sense, Afghanistan goes the way of the Philippines, a country servicing American troops. That is unsurprising because the NATO contingent’s budget exceeds the Afghani budget manifold. From pop-culture to brothels, Afghanis have become “American-friendly.” Decades of attrition, an atrocious civil war, and Western influence have turned the brave mountain nation into weaklings who depend on foreign aid and protection. After the US withdrawal local incomes will dwindle, and the population will remain nostalgic for the good Americans.

The obligation to resist evil depends on the feasibility of resistance.

We need not right all wrongs. A classical example is Meir Kahane’s attitude toward anti-apartheid protests: he declared apartheid disgusting but decided that Jews need not subvert the only regime truly friendly to Israel to establish an anti-Semitic black government. My guess is that Rabbi Kahane’s critique of apartheid was half-hearted: just as Jews isolate ourselves from the West Bank Arabs, so the Boers were justified in isolating themselves from the Bantustans.

Myself, I truly don’t care about Darfur; it is just as irrelevant to me as any traffic accident in China or tribal conflict in Polynesia. Note your instinctive reaction: how dare he compare such things! But what is the difference between tribal conflicts in Polynesia and Darfur? The only difference is subjective: years of media brainwashing have made Darfur into a household name, and the locals into a sort of neighbors entitled to compassion. Scores of atrocities and natural disasters around the world grossly exceed what happens in Darfur, but very few people hear about them. In fact, very few people know anything about Darfur other than the name, including such important things as that the oppressed tribe started the current round of the conflict, which has gone on for centuries.

The scope of the conflict is unknown. The claims of hundreds of thousands of casualties cannot be true: with both sides armed, dispersed, and conducting primitive warfare, achieving such a death toll would be difficult. Besides the estimates being just beefed up, the casualties are largely attributable to the natural causes which similarly affect other parts of Africa. Understand that the civilized world cannot provide for the Africans forever: on Western food aid and medicines their numbers swelled and became unsupportable. It is a desert there, and it cannot support an ever-growing population. While technological improvements can alleviate food shortages to a degree, they can do little about the water shortage. The claims by “human rights experts” that Sudanese militia are destroying wells in the region are absurd because wells are small, numerous, and easily replaceable. Rather, as happens throughout Africa, local gangs take over the wells and charge the locals for water consumption. This iscertainly a heavy burden, but it is not an issue to be solved in Washington.

There is nothing really to be done about Darfur. Sudan, an inward-looking economy, is immune to Western sanctions. On the contrary, the more hysterically the West denounces the alleged atrocities, the stronger is the support for Sudan among Arab countries. A Western peacekeeping action in Sudan is impossible, as it would require the consent of the Sudanese government according to the UN charter. A military action would be unrealistic: America cannot feasibly control huge Sudan, which is infested with Muslim terrorists. Massive food delivery is not feasible: the transportation costs would reach cosmic proportions and local gangs would be selling the aid in any case. The absurdity of the current arrangements can be seen from the fact that “humanitarian aid” was delivered to Darfur by charter planes, making it perhaps only slightly more expensive than gold. Given a sliver of the funds collected for them, the persecuted locals can bribe the Sudanese militia to leave them alone and buy food nearby hundreds of times cheaper than what it costs to deliver it to them by the current methods. The very impossibility of really aiding the Darfurians is a boon to their institutional supporters, as they need not spend for the aid. In reality, they misuse the entire collected amounts for ads and salaries.

I’m not a racist in the sense of advocating the active persecution of people based on their race. I have my doubts about the concept of universal equality as it contradicts the fact that Jews excel in physics and blacks excel in football. But I would react similarly to an aid hysteria for Yugoslavia or any other white country. The difference, though, is important to the activists: blacks in a remote region are exotic, and like any exotic goods they easily evolve into a fashion.

Jewish liberals claim that the Holocaust should make us considerate of other people’s sufferings. Wrong. The Holocaust teaches us that we should care for our fellow Jews and do everything it takes to help them. When rockets are falling on Sderot and yeshiva students in Jerusalem subsist on bread, normal Jews should have no time or money left for Darfur Muslims or Christians, blacks or Arabs, cats or monkeys.

Tellingly, the liberals who beat their collective chest over something in Darfur do nothing about Sderot, where an entire generation of Jewish children have grown up without knowing a peaceful life. The renegade Jews save you-don’t-know-who-from-whom in Darfur but have no problem with tens of thousands of rockets falling on Sderot for nine years. Self-hating Jews busy themselves with ad hoc causes in order to leave themselves no time for Jewish causes; they squeeze out their unwelcome Jewishness.

Jewish support for Darfur won’t make the world a less anti-Semitic place. Those who despise Jews often dislike blacks, and in any case won’t be moved by Jewish work in favor of some backwater tribes in a country hostile to America.

As a bottom line, I don’t want “Darfur refugees,” the real and fake ones, to swarm Israel. The government can charter flights to let them dwell in the suburban houses of American Darfur activists.

Statistics are misleading. The West Bank Arabs are many, but they are concentrated in pockets. Eviction won’t cause a widespread upheaval. The Arabs can even be left in their largest towns―let them have a Ramallah-sized Palestine.

True, Muslims are not idolaters, and are not prohibited from residing in the Land of Israel. But non-Jewish worship is still ‘foreign worship’ according to the Torah. There is also the political necessity of expelling the natives because they would always view the Jews as illegitimate invaders. It would be interesting to establish a country in which Jews and Muslims worship jointly―and jointly rip off divine imagery from the churches. In reality, that’s not going to happen, and expelling the Arabs is the Jews’ only alternative to being expelled by them.

The Arab who murdered the Jewish family in Itamar—just how evil he is? Allied pilots bombed German cities, and Jewish Irgun bombed Arab markets; Irgun’s leader went on to become Israel’s prime minister and a canonized figure. There is certainly a difference between killing from a distance and personally murdering a two-month old baby. That difference, however, is ethical rather than moral: the allied bombers accepted the fact that they would inevitably kill enemy children and babies, but they would probably have shrunk from doing so deliberately. This is a reflection of the general trend in warfare away from personal killing: missiles replaced swords, and the officer class of the military long ago ceased to bloody their own hands with the murderous work required in war. Officers’ weapons are merely symbolic, the killing being relegated to the soldiery.

So yes, we can conclude that the ethics of Allied pilots and Jewish guerrillas were indeed more developed than those of Arab terrorists, but morally their actions are not tremendously different. We can feel ethical disdain for the Arab murderer just as we disdain someone with bad manners in a restaurant, but that’s about the limit for an honest person’s reaction. Think about it: our reaction to the murders would have been much more muted if the victims had been soldiers or adults. No sane person would claim that the life of a baby is more valuable than that of an adolescent or adult. In fact, it is probably less valuable, considering that society sanctions late-term abortions of viable fetuses if there is a danger to the mother. A special notice to fellow right-wingers: most of us decried the inept prosecution of the Gaza war two years ago, with its avoidance of civilian casualties among the enemy. We would have no problem with Israeli soldiers killing their babies, but we tend to clothe the reverse situation in moralistic terms. Such attitudes make us like the proverbial aborigine who explains to an ethnologist the difference between good and evil: evil is when an enemy robs his village and rapes his women, while good is when he does likewise to the enemy.

And yes, the Arab was brave. Unethical, brutally moral, but brave. How many of you could imagine sneaking into an Arab village and killing a family there, whether to drive the Arabs out of Jewish land or as a means of retaliation? You condone—and indeed encourage—the killing, but lie on couches while it is done, unwilling to put your money where your mouth is.

Riots are rarely predictable. We failed to predict the first two Intifadas, and timing of the third one is anybody’s guess. But there are good reasons to expect it. Israel’s ability to deter such an uprising is compromised. IDF relies heavily on intelligence from Fatah, though we may lose this level of cooperation at any moment, just as we lost similar contacts with Jordan and Egypt. The Arabs’ expectations of massive prisoner releases, which would include murderers, decrease the perceived costs of terrorism. Revolutions in the Arab world set the stage for relatively educated and free Palestinians to revolt against their corrupt and illegitimate leaders. Hamas is emboldened and flush with money, and thus will be more active among terrorists and common Arabs alike. The failure of the peace process, coupled with recognition of the Palestinian state by many governments, suggests to the Arabs that they need just one final push to obtain independence.

Most of all, the central terrorist authority is crumbling: both Fatah and Hamas have become entrenched government parties, unwilling to risk their political and financial position by launching major waves of terrorism against Israel. That leaves militant Palestinian activists on their own. Accordingly, they form small bands that are virtually undetectable to Israeli security services. This was the situation before the First Intifada: with Fatah exiled to Tunisia, grassroots militancy had no vent and exploded. Terrorism can be dealt with when it is channeled through large organizations that can be monitored, but not when the entire Palestinian society is seething with militant activism. And we will soon see Facebook terrorism, encouraged and coordinated through the Web with no command centers in the West Bank.

The present situation is untenable. We can expel the Arabs from Judea and Samaria, or we can wall them off and present the world with the fait accompli borders of the Palestinian state. We can accept their terms and partition the Land of Israel or tell them clearly that such a partition will never happen, even at the cost of perpetual war. But the government, which knows what kind of concessions will be required, hints at its readiness to accept them but does not sign off on them. Such a government certainly provokes its enemies for the last battle. And such a government is the real culprit in the Itamar murder.

Leaders change history for the short term only, but that might suffice to inflict unbearable damage on Israel—or on the world, given the existence of nuclear weapons. Assassinating Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Nasser, as well as Assad and Rafsanjani, would have been cheap and efficient, and would have change the immediate history. For years, German generals planned to displace Hitler through a putsch or arrest him during a visit to the front command, but none of them had the courage to simply shoot him. Governments maintain truces, and avoid attacking enemy leaders so as not to be endangered themselves. Military leaders are especially cowardly, being used to discipline and subservience. German generals feared overthrowing Hitler.

Democratic leaders behave poorly in crises: democracy teaches them conformity. The Czech president capitulated to Germany despite a major military advantage over it. Leaders only catch on to danger slowly, after great losses.

Armed with authoritarian powers, leaders make fatal decisions: Czech president Benesh decided against fighting Nazi Germany; the British and French prime ministers procrastinated in signing a mutual defense treaty with Russia; Stalin did not capitulate to Hitler, which could have allowed Germany to win the world war; Levi Eshkol preempted in 1967 and Golda Meir did not preempt in 1973. In the age of fast mobile warfare and WMD, leaders don’t give their nations a second chance. Thus, large centralized states cannot survive because they fail over a single error.

A Hitler today, armed with a moderate arsenal of 200 nuclear bombs, might not be able to destroy a country the size of Russia, but could certainly wipe out a small country before common sense stopped him.

People buy products because they like them; people accept political views because they hate the alternatives. The contradiction is superficial: even complex products such as cars are easy for consumers to comprehend and evaluate, but policies are too complex for evaluation. Often, there’s no policy at all but an opposition to the opponent’s policy. Who can tell the practical difference between the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, especially when big money supports both of them? In the effort to gain the broadest support, programs are made vague and indistinguishable.
In wars, political aims are fuzzy if they exist at all, and propaganda further distorts them. Deciding which party is right in remote conflicts is impossible for the lack of first-hand experience and basic information. The Westerners who support a persecuted tribe in Darfur don’t know which tribe persecutes which, and are oblivious to important facts: the hostilities in the area have smoldered for centuries, and the now-persecuted tribe launched the current round of fighting.

Unlike consumer instincts, political instincts are very weak most of the time. People buy goods on their own, and only unite when an enemy threatens their consumer habits. The strongest feeling, hate, is needed to shore up the weakest instinct, the political one. Westerners marched against apartheid, not for the blacks.

The evolution taught people that goodness is the natural way of things. To restore goodness, one only needs to break down the accrued distortions. Good ends are achieved not by promoting goodness, but by hating and destroying the distortions of it—then the goodness would develop on its own.

Goodness is multi-faceted. Ask Westerners how best to help the Africans, and you get a thousand answers whose proponents cannot agree on a common ground. Hatred is targeted because the distortions are fewer than the ways of goodness. Every group has its own definition of good, but the traits of evil are fixed: war, crime, and taxation without representation. Hate is the common denominator among very different people.

For a strong action, human beings unite around hate rather than goodness. Not incidentally, the Hebrew word for “neighbor” is a cognate of “evil” or “deviation.” We deviate together with our neighbors from others’ ways, and mean evil to them.

In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Arabs bank on Jew-hatred. Demonstrators condemn Israel rather than support the Palestinians. The test is simple: hundreds of thousands participated in anti-Israeli demonstrations, but few of them gave even ten dollars to Palestinian causes. They don’t love Arabs; they hate Jews.

The photos of Gazan children dead in Israeli attacks cannot arouse sympathy for Palestinians because blood-soaked images are inherently disgusting, but they intensify hatred and channel it onto Jews.

Politically correct Jews are afraid to rely on hatred in their propaganda efforts. Israelis defend their military operations against Palestinians rather than accuse the Arabs, but it’s a long-established fact that defenders always lose, whether on the battlefield or in media. Israeli propagandists have to go on offensive against Arabs especially since the opportunities are numerous. Arabs are barbarous (female genital mutilations, honor killings), religious fundamentalists (incitement at Friday prayers), dangerous to the world (Islamic terrorism, the spread of Wahhabism, million-strong crowds at religious events), exploitative (the oil racket), primitive, lazy, and unruly.

The liberal approach of judging each person on his merits is propaganda’s dead end. It also runs contrary to Judaism, in which nations are judged as a whole: Jews suffer for the sins of idolaters, and the Amalek probably had some decent people among them. In the real world, good people have to leave the evil milieu, as Lot did. Generalization is an essential propaganda tool. Israelis are wrong to confuse foreigners with the “PLO good/Hamas bad” dichotomy, especially since both are terrorist groups. The Arabs of Palestine elected Hamas as their governing party, and are fully responsible for its actions.
Words matter: “Palestinians” have the right to Palestine, but the “Arabs of Palestine” just live here. “Palestinians” are in a league of their own, while “Arabs of Palestine” are the same Arabs who manned the 9/11 attacks and carried out the Madrid bombing.

Israeli propaganda should be structured from general to particular: Islam sanctions treacherousness in regard to infidels, thus we cannot rely on Palestinian promises of peace; Hamas broke the ceasefire in Gaza, and the PLO reneged on many agreements to curb terrorism. Islamic terrorists from Al Qaeda attacked the West, and similar Islamic terrorists perpetrate daily attacks against Israel. Jews must show the common Americans and Europeans that we have the same Muslim enemy.

And we have similar problems with Muslims. Europeans are fed up with Muslim throngs swarming their cities: show them that Israeli Arabs are also immigrants who did not live here a century ago. They are alien and disloyal, and sympathize with Arab terrorists.

Israel must vehemently accuse the Arabs. Don’t be ashamed to show the world photos of Jewish women and children dead and maimed in Arab attacks. Publicize the animal-like faces of Palestinian demonstrators twisted in hatred. Jews always shrank from that because we sensed that gentiles didn’t want to hear of our sufferings; even the death camps turned into Holocaust memorials are nice and clean. No, show them the grisly part of death. When Arab supporters throw in a photo or two of dead Palestinian children, we have an obligation to suppress our feelings and publish thousands of photos of Muslim terrorist acts in Israel, each dripping with blood and full of torn limbs. And we must relate to Americans, Europeans, and Russians that those are the same terrorists who bombed their cities. The power of fear cannot be overestimated, and everyone has a reason to fear Arabs, whether immigrants or terrorists.

Don’t be petty. The world doesn’t care about the pipes filled with ammonium being fired at the Israeli desert. Make gross accusations instead: terrible massacres of Jews, exterminatory rhetoric, Hamas connections with Iran, Al Qaeda presence in Gaza, Hezbollah influence in Bolivia, Hamas cells in America. It doesn’t matter that some of the accusations are unproven.

Propaganda is surprisingly similar to court advocacy. A good attorney doesn’t attempt to win his case with a silver bullet. Instead, he heaps discrediting evidence against his opponents. Though they might disprove many of the arguments or at least show them to be dubious, the heap itself has a power of persuasion.

A hundred arguments, each one percent credible, amount to a hundred-percent credibility. This effect is commonly known as the power of repetition: even the most stupid ad generates sales if shown often enough. But consider that Arabs, Jew-haters, and leftists have plenty of media outlets at their disposal while Israel lacks even a single 24/7 satellite channel on par with Al Jazeera. Selling a political point is no different from selling any product: develop a sales idea, create a slogan, produce an ad, and keep showing it to build customer loyalty.

Timing is critical. On one hand, Muslim electoral and economic influence in the West is rising. On other hand, anti-Muslim sentiment grows stronger in response. We don’t want a Christian-Muslim friendship to develop, which can only mean trouble for Jews.

Most foreigners don’t know much about the Jewish-Muslim conflict or care about it. They form their opinions based on each party’s zeal. Only by hateful, zealous propaganda can Jews turn the tide of public opinion against Arabs.

There is no answer to the Why not? No one can credibly explain why pornography or homosexuality is an objective abomination and destroys the very moral bases of societies. But we cannot explain many other things, too. Communists tried to predict prices and demand, and their planned economy failed miserably. There are no convincing proofs for the Big Bang or ape-to-human evolution, but they are taught in schools. People uncritically accept extremely questionable theories which bear heavily on their lives, such as democracy, reserve rate regulation, or social security investment. The very same people, however, demand formal proof for time-tested, obvious concepts, such as moral abominations. There is no such proof, nor could it ever appear; go ask your Federal Reserve chairman for a proof that the 0.25% rate change was indeed required. Many, perhaps most things in our lives, cannot be proven.

The people who abandon moral objectivism have moral preferences of their own which they try to enforce on others. The ACLU—which fought for the great constitutional right to sell porno magazines in common shops, barely disguised by a partial cover—enforced on the moral, non-consenting parents and their children the obligation to see the disgusting titles in bookshops and even supermarkets. The “XXX Adult Movies” signs throughout the residential areas are not harmless because they arouse mental associations and attract; any evil is attractive, or it would have died out. Libertarians, in effect, send to non-consenting adults and children a strong message that pornography is okay, look at all those porn shops around; they even explicitly teach children in schools that homosexuality is okay.

The Torah bans incest with a puzzling statement: it is hesed, loving-kindness. Genetic predisposition makes incest too much of an attraction, and the Torah prohibits such a strong desire, which can otherwise turn harmful. Pornography and homosexuality are doubtless present, they certainly appeal to strong desires. The obscenities might be not bad per se, but they open a door to indisputable moral degradation. Forget holiness or morality, what ethics can we expect from someone whose mouth waters at the sight of abominable scenes even as he watches them privately?

The world cannot exist in a vacuum of values. Once a value is removed, its opposite promptly takes its place.

Repression of immorality is justified on the grounds of marginal utility. Everything can be driven over the edge; every value can become its opposite. Freedom of speech, if taken as absolute, becomes a freedom of Nazi incitement. A freedom of pornography becomes a freedom of picturing minors in pornographic acts—which might not be illegal in the countries where the pictures are shot. Thirty years ago, even liberal feminists argued that hardcore pornography degrades women; obviously, such movies don’t promote respect for women.

Freedoms, like everything, are highly destructive and almost useless at the margins. A freedom of entertainment in the privacy of one’s home needs not extend to the marginal freedom of homosexual “marriage.” The Bible is not overly restrictive: for example, it accepts non-Jewish prostitution matter-of-factly, such as in the Judah and Tamar episode. Pornography is very different from prostitution in its reach: prostitutes are very few even in Israel, and they don’t substantially degrade public morality; pornography, on the other hand, is ubiquitous.

Restrictions on marginal freedoms are not necessarily detrimental to societal evolution. The evolution of morals is questionable in the first place; prostitution is as fringe an activity now as four thousand years ago. All societies criminalize some behavior; revolutionaries seek to overcome the prohibitions. Imagine a society which allows everything: it would soon be ruined by mad social experimentation. It is right for societies to erect entry barriers to new ideas and ostensibly new values: their adherents have to overcome the initial hostility, even if illegally, and convince the majority that their ideas are viable. In such a way, viable ideas proliferate eventually, while the wrong ideas are filtered out. One example is the anti-slavery movement, which was illegal originally but convinced most people in time. Such incremental, slow-paced evolution might be abominable to social reformers, but the only alternative would be allowing everything, down to Nazi groupings, KKK gatherings, and drug addiction. If it is legal to ban racism, a political theory, then how much more legal should it be to ban pornography?

Libertarians counter that since “one man’s freedom to swing his fist ends at the tip of another man’s nose,” there will always be ample opportunity to restrict harmful freedoms. That is not so at least because in the real life the noses are not clear-cut. Besides, the constant swinging of fists pushes the noses back and back. And more often than not, the nose’s owner has no time to react. We may not like the spread of pornography, but by now it is so well ensconced in liberal society that driving it back seems impossible.

A typical libertarian argument is that a country which suppresses some expression will eventually suppress much wider expression, even including political speech. That is nonsense. Societies constantly balance opposing objectives. That’s what the system of checks and balances is for. The libertarian argument can be applied to the government: every government tends to assume the most powers, so shall we dismantle the governments? No, but we keep them in check, theoretically, with judicial review. Contrary to the argument, it is the very equating of freedoms that dilutes them.

America enjoyed excellent freedom of political expression for two centuries when pornography was prohibited. After pornography became protected under the same freedom of expression statute as political speech, both of them became censored simultaneously.

The media and web hosting providers, who refuse publicity to child porn, also refuse publicity to “hate speech” and other controversial political expression. That is so simple: if pornography and political speech are both “expression” in the constitutional sense, if both of them enjoy the same First Amendment protection, then logically the same restrictions should apply for both. Indeed, it would be very non-liberal to censor one type of expression (porn) but not the other (political speech). Here we see a typical sophistic problem: expanding the term’s meaning undermines it. Once freedom of expression is construed to cover pornography, and while some restrictions on pornography are universally accepted, the same restrictions are applied to any expression.

The liberals who fought for legitimizing pornography in the 1960s, sowed the seeds of the current restrictions on free political speech.