Ridiculous equivilance.

You really should read this entire commentary by Charles Krauthammer reprimanding Barack Obama for a display of moral equivilance that is truly infantile. That’s not hyperbole either. For an American president to got to the heart of the Islamic world and say these things not only is silly but actually undermines the persecuted pro-democracy minority.

Here’s Krauthammer’s best example:

Obama offered Muslims a careful admonition about women’s rights, noting how denying women education impoverishes a country — balanced, of course, with this: “Issues of women’s equality are by no means simply an issue for Islam.” Example? “The struggle for women’s equality continues in many aspects of American life.”

Well, yes. On the one hand, there certainly is some American university where the women’s softbal team has received insufficient Title IX funds — while, on the other hand, Saudi women showing ankle are beaten in the street, Afghan school girls have acid thrown in their faces, and Iranian women are publicly stoned to death for adultery. (Gays, as well — but then again we have Prop 8.) We all have our shortcomings, our national foibles. Who’s to judge?

That’s the problem with Obama’s transcultural evenhandedness. It gives the veneer of professoria sophistication to the most simple-minded observation: Of course there are rights and wrongs in al human affairs. Our species is a fallen one. But that doesn’t mean that these rights and wrongs are of equal weight.