WHEN STEVEN WALT QUOTES AUDEN, IT’S A LOW, DISHONEST REFERENCE.

“As early as 1944 he had abandoned the stanza…that ended, ‘We must love one another or die.’ This line was more widely quoted and admired than perhaps anything else in his work…and in 1957 he told a fellow poet, ‘Between you and me, I loathe that poem.’”

He began to refuse to allow it to be anthologized, and when a friend of his complained he was making his most memorable poem invisible in this way, Auden responded, “if, by memorability, you mean a poem like September 1, 1939, I pray to God that I shall never be memorable again.”

The moral relativism that suffused Auden’s poem and reaction to the invasion of Poland is perfectly and precisely mirrored today by people like Stephen Walt, who quote words Auden himself came to view with contempt and shame.

Just as the nations that imposed the Versailles treaty on Germany were not doing it evil—after all, Germany had set in motion the events that effectively destroyed pre-WW1 Europe and led to the deaths of 20 million people for which it was rightfully being forced to pay reparations—so too Israel has done no “evil” to Hamas. It disengaged from Gaza in 2005 and thus made it possible for Hamas to take operational control of the area after an election in 2007. Every conflict between Israel and Hamas in the 16 years since has been the result of an aggressive and unprovoked attack on Hamas’s part. Then came this past week.

Stephen Walt’s repellent relativism is a perfect reflection of the bizarre hunger on the part of those unwilling to face the true meaning of Hamas’s attack.

So much that passes for intellectualism today is simply built around remembering something you learned as a freshman in college, out of context.