Over on LGF, Charles Johnson posted the following picture, which has generated quite a bit of commentary.

Within the comments section itself emerged a mini thread that I’d like to repost here.

First, Mac Frazier writes:

It’s this very sort of thing that drives away any sympathy I’ve ever had for the movement.

‘I value my cause more than my child.’

Then your cause must die.

It’s not a rational response, but still…the evil crap that is pumped into the heads of little ones for the sake of a ’cause’ is stunning and sickening.

…to which “nyob” [no address] replied:

…‘I value my cause more than my child.’

Then your cause must die…

Hmmm… couldn’t the same be said for ‘protecting the American-Way-Of-Life™’? Is it respectable for us to raise our children with the belief that our country’s ideals are important enough to die for? Is it OK for us to send our children to die for our ’cause’? It seems everyone has a cause — but there cause is the only one that’s ‘right’.

TopKnot concurs and even adds a new wrinkle — the trope of “Otherness,” intellectually camouflaged here as a nod toward Pink Floyd:

nyob is right. There is no ‘good’ cause to die for. ‘Good cause’ is the inner glue of nationalities; it’s what keeps them together.

If ‘our cause’ wouldn’t be better then ‘their cause’, then why should their be ‘us’ and ‘them’?

‘Us’ and ‘them’ is the controlling leash of all kind of leader: Politicians, religious leaders (from all religions) and other.

Humanity, of course, needs its leaders.

Take a look at the leaders of the US, Israel and the Palestinians (not the single man at the top, but the upper ruling class) and you will find that you can differentiate between them.

Well, not to put too fine a point on it…. but horseshit, “nyob.” And horseshit to you, too, TopKnot. This kind of muddled thinking — the bastard child of postmodern philosophy and self-interested realpolitik — is the very reason Saddam Hussein still casts his ominous shadow over the Middle East, for instance. Live and let live is a fine notion, unless one set of actors in the equation has no desire to honor the agreement.

I wrote this on Charles’ site, but I’ll repeat it here: Festooning five-year old girls with faux dynamite belts is not the equivalent of shouting “give me liberty or give me death.”

Instead, “nyob” and TopKnot are engaging in a rather tedious and bald-faced sophistry (of the “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” sort).

In one sense, they are correct: we each (according to our particular ideological tethers) have a cause, and often that foundational cause conflicts with the causes of others — creating “us” and “them” distinctions, as TopKnot notes.

Which would pass for a profound observation if it weren’t so utterly irrelevant. Because the operative variable here is the content of the cause, not the fact of the cause; that is, we can point to a “cause” whose motivating ideology is the utter annihilation of a particular group of people (we’ll call these targets “Jews”