Jose F. Moreno, the left-wing Chicano Studies who ran unsuccessfully for Anaheim City Council last year, shared this post on his Facebook page shortly after Islamic State terrorists brutally executed 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians merely for being Christians:

Jose Moreno compare ISIS to US

 

The article Moreno shared (at some point he deleted his share from his Facebook page) is a post on the left-wing blog Daily Kos by Chauncey DeVega, a radical who sees the world through race-colored glasses (for example, he has called Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas “the greatest Uncle Tom of all time and legendary self-hating negro” and characterized actress Patricia Arquette’s feminist outburst at the Oscars as “racist comments.”)  DeVega’s post is a classic exercise in America-loathing moral equivalency of the sort specialized in by denizens of the political Left. He explicitly equates the Islamic States atrocities with the brutalities committed against black Americans in the old Jim Crow South a century ago. As a result, he believes the United States lacks the moral standing to condemn the Islamic State. This is a reflex peculiar to the radical Left in American politics, which see the United States as destructive rather than beneficial force in world affairs. It’s the same mentality that believed the Cold War was the result of provocative, aggressive American policies rather than the Soviet Union and its tyrannical, expansionist, revolutionary ideology.

For racialists like DeVega, everything – law and government, arts and culture, media, the structure of society — is a structural manifestation of white racial dominance and that America is a racist nation; a bad place.  So when DeVega and his kindred spirits see American leaders condemning the mass beheading of those Copts and other Islamic State atrocities, their first reaction is “Hypocrites! America is just as bad!”

That is moral blindness. Black Americans suffered horribly in the Jim Crow South. They were deprived of their inalienable rights as American citizens and it is a stain on our national story that it took a century for so many black Americans to share fully in the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But the lynchings and burning that took place were mob actions, not government policy. Indeed, they seen as horrific at the time in part because these acts were the antithesis of civilization and the principles of the American Founding. were also a source of condemnation from Americans of all colors across the country.

The beheadings of the Egyptian Copts, the burning alive of the Jordanian pilot – these are deliberate, unapologetic acts of state. They are officials acts of the Islamic State. These atrocities reflect the nature of the regime that conceived and executed them, and then broadcast them to the world. The moral difference is self-evident to ordinary people but lost on the racialist intelligentsia who have had moral sense educated out of them.

America is a good and great country in which evils have been committed; Islamic State is an evil entity, that practices evil in the name of an evil ideology. A child can see as much.

Why would Moreno share such a wretched, morally-stunted exercise in America-bashing? While he limited his comment to an ambiguous “Yikes!,” scrolling through his Facebook page makes it abundantly clear Moreno posts articles espousing viewpoints with which he agrees and wants to share with others. It’s hard to believe Moreno disagrees with Devega’s disturbing exercise in moral equivalency and the philosophical premises underpinning it – they’re part and parcel of the intellectual pond of ethnic and racial studies in our nation’s universities.