BRULOTTE: CBC's 9/11 ‘terrorism’ debacle exposes the West's dangerous inability to name evil

Dr. Bryan Brulotte is Chairman of Sterling-Trust, a Canadian private equity firm. He brings more than four decades of leadership experience spanning the military, private, and public sectors.There are moments when excessive nuance ceases to be sophistication and becomes an excuse for moral cowardice. The recent controversy at the CBC over whether journalists should describe the attacks of September 11, 2001, as terrorism was one of those moments. Nearly 3,000 people were murdered that morning, and civilian aircraft were deliberately hijacked and turned into weapons.Al-Qaeda did not accidentally kill civilians while pursuing a legitimate military objective. Murdering and terrorizing civilians was the objective. Yet 25 years later, Canada's national broadcaster found itself tied in intellectual knots over whether the word “terrorism” was appropriate.The CBC ultimately reversed course, and rightly so. But the fact that such a debate occurred at all reveals something troubling about the intellectual culture that has developed across parts of our media, universities, and other institutions. What does it say about the West when highly educated institutions struggle to call the deliberate slaughter of civilians terrorism? We have become uncomfortable distinguishing between good and evil. We search for context, historical grievances, power structures, and competing narratives, all of which can be important. But understanding evil does not require pretending it does not exist.Hamas is evil. Hezbollah is evil. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is evil, not simply because we disagree with their politics, but because terrorism, repression, and violence against civilians are instruments of their ideological objectives. October 7 demonstrated what that means. Hamas terrorists deliberately attacked Israeli communities, murdered civilians, and took hostages, while Hezbollah has spent decades building an armed terrorist organization committed to Israel's destruction. The IRGC supports terrorist proxies throughout the Middle East while serving a regime that brutally represses its own people. Moral clarity does not require moral simplicity. One can support Palestinian statehood and condemn Hamas, just as one can criticize Israeli policies and military operations while recognizing Israel's right to defend itself. Democracies can make mistakes without becoming morally equivalent to organizations that deliberately murder civilians. .Israel is a democracy, not a morally perfect state. Its government can be criticized, its military actions scrutinized, and its leaders held accountable. That capacity for criticism and accountability is itself part of what distinguishes democratic societies from terrorist movements and authoritarian regimes. Yet that distinction has become increasingly blurred on Western university campuses. After October 7, parts of academia transformed terrorism into “resistance,” as historical grievances became explanations, and explanations became justifications. Eventually, in some quarters, the victims themselves became the defendants.The intellectual failure of the oppressor-versus-oppressed worldview is particularly dangerous. When morality is determined primarily by who possesses power, the weaker party can gradually become absolved of responsibility for what it actually does. That is how deliberately murdering civilians can be linguistically transformed into “resistance.”This is where intellectual laziness masquerades as sophistication. Terrorists become products of circumstances rather than people responsible for their choices, while democracies become inherently suspect because they possess power. That is not serious scholarship; it is ideology. History demonstrates the danger of such thinking. The Allied democracies that defeated Nazi Germany were deeply imperfect societies, and Allied military operations killed civilians. Yet it would be intellectually absurd to conclude there was therefore no meaningful moral distinction between the Allies and Nazi Germany..The great achievement of Western liberal democracy is not moral perfection. It is the capacity for self-correction through elections, free expression, independent institutions, and the rule of law. Governments fall, policies change, leaders are investigated, and citizens can condemn their governments without disappearing into prisons. A democracy capable of correcting its failures is fundamentally different from a terrorist movement or authoritarian regime dedicated to eliminating its enemies. Recognizing that difference is not Western arrogance; it is moral judgment.Criticism of the West remains healthy and necessary. But decades of moral relativism have made some Western institutions considerably better at identifying the sins of their own civilization than recognizing the nature of those who seek to destroy it. Self-examination becomes dangerous when it deteriorates into moral blindness. Universities should teach young Canadians to question authority, examine evidence, and challenge conventional thinking. They must also provide the historical knowledge and intellectual confidence necessary to make moral judgments. Sometimes both sides are wrong, but sometimes one side deliberately flies passenger aircraft into buildings, massacres civilians, takes hostages, or finances terrorist armies.Calling those acts evil is not simplistic. Calling terrorism terrorism is not an abandonment of journalistic neutrality; it is an accurate description of reality. Intellectual sophistication should help us understand the difference, not erase it. Can the West still recognize evil? I believe it can, but first we must recover the confidence to call things by their proper names. A civilization that can no longer recognize evil will eventually lose the will to defend itself against it.Dr. Bryan Brulotte is Chairman of Sterling-Trust, a Canadian private equity firm. He brings more than four decades of leadership experience spanning the military, private, and public sectors.

BRULOTTE: CBC's 9/11 ‘terrorism’ debacle exposes the West's dangerous inability to name evil

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