Relativism

Writing in the Guardian, ex-Python Terry Jones puts the Iranian hostage crisis in perspective:

It is also unacceptable that these British captives should be made to talk on television and say things that they may regret later. If the Iranians put duct tape over their mouths, like we do to our captives, they wouldn't be able to talk at all. Of course they'd probably find it even harder to breathe - especially with a bag over their head - but at least they wouldn't be humiliated.

So true. We are the barbarians, while civilised restraint is almost the hallmark of this Iranian regime:

Have you ever held a bloody tool in your hands with which they have murdered your mother?
Have you ever touched the bloody skin and hair of your mother who has just been killed in a deep hole?
Have you ever followed the line of your mother’s blood in order to find her corpse thrown at the back of a truck?

I'm wholly opposed to Guantanamo Bay. I'm wholly opposed to any extra-judicial treatment of prisoners. I've blogged before, repeatedly, about the problems that stem from declaring a "War on Terror". It leads to a perpetual state of emergency, a prerequisite for state tyranny analogous to that envisaged in Orwell's 1984. It makes it impossible to hold prisoners of war properly, because no armistice can ever be signed with "Terror".

But to suggest that Iran is morally better than America - which has been faced with a problem of how to deal with enemy combatants that is never addressed by relativists like Jones - is the act of a moral cripple. Like Jones.