> So what's in the book? Ace is rather short on that detail.
As far as the book goes, the debate seems mainly to turn mainly on a sentence on p. 236 in the German edition: "Diejenigen, die sich selbst fuer die Sache ihres Volkes getoetet haben, haben sich in der Tat selbst gerechtfertigt." "Those who kill themselves for their people have already in that act in itself justified themselves." (The original English actually seems a tad stronger, if it was quoted properly in the article I saw on the web -- there, rather than "justify," it actually says they've "sanctified" themselves.)
You can see how people might go wild with that: self justifying acts, ends justifying means, and most of all, that he's claiming it's okay to blow up innocent children if your cause is good -- which he is.
Of course, as Justin points out, this is ripped from context, and it's a weird and philosophical context where a guy has rambled far from common sense in pursuit of logical coherence. In philosophy you're allowed to do that. You're allow to defend any proposition, no matter how outlandish on its face, and it is considered amateurish to criticize it without considering all the propositions as a whole. And as Justin has also pointed out, Honderich has collected an almost unique collection of beliefs to support propositions like this. He's probably the only person the world who thinks that the bombing of the King David Hotel by the Irgun and the Dolphin discotheque by Hamas are both justified moral acts.
But a philosopher who wades into debate about public issues can't really squawk that he's judged by non-philosophers on non-philosophical grounds. And in the public sphere it's perfectly acceptable for people to find a particular proposition, considered all by itself, to be outrageous.
Don't get me wrong. I'm against banning books, I'm against encroaching on philosophical freedom, and I think they shouldn't have done this. But I'm not at all surprised, and I don't think anyone else should be.
The dynamic is that German Jewish intellectuals, all of whom have family and friends in Israel, read some of Honderich's statements about it being okay to blow up Israelis and said that's anti-semitic: he's saying it's okay to kill Jews. To which his defenders respond, in essence: it's not anti-semitic. He says it's okay to blow up other people too.
You can imagine much that calmed things down in the age of terrorism.
The Germans, meanwhile, when it comes to Jews, are a little like American white liberals in the 60s. If all their German Jewish intellectuals tell them something is anti-semitic, they feel compelled to accept it.
And banning books doesn't have the same connotations in Germany that it has in the US. Ever since WWII it's been illegal to publish anything anti-semitic in Germany. They don't think of that as Nazism; they think of that as its opposite. They think suppressing bad views is part of defending liberalism.
It's all very weird to an American. It's kind of like when they banned the Scientologists.
Michael