Fuzzy moral accounting

Back when I was attending University in Manhattan, a friend of mine got mugged on his way back, late at night, from a concert at Harlem's famed Apollo Theater.  An impromptu splurge on a couple of CD's after the concert had diminished my friends pocket money to a small collection of coins so instead of taking a taxi as he'd originally planned, he thanked-G-d for his trusty MetroCard and set off to take the subway home.

On his way to the nearest subway station he was dragged into an apartment vestibule by a couple of teenagers and relieved of his new CDs, his watch and approximately 60 cents in change. 

Whether out of disappointment at the paltry haul or just plain meanness, the teens worked my friend over pretty well, leaving him with a split lip, a bloody nose and more bruises than he'd ever experienced at one time in his life.

The next day as the story began to circulate among his friends, a consensus began to form; 'What the heck was he doing on 125th Street after midnight?'  In short, while there was, of course, general head shaking and tongue clucking over the assault, the conventional wisdom held that he had placed himself in unnecessary danger by walking through such a bad neighborhood late at night.

At the time I remember feeling a mild disconnect at this warped logic.  Were the laws less strictly enforced in Harlem?  Was 125th street some kind of 'Indian Territory' that was beyond the long arm of the law after dark.  Were the people who lived in that neighborhood held to a different standard of conduct?

I have to admit that I didn't dwell on these questions overly long as they were in complete discord with the tenets of my liberal upbringing.  To pursue that line of questioning would have required exploring the many unconscious departures I'd made from political correctness in the name of survival in the big city. 

Let's face it, it's not comfortable thinking about having crossed the street late at night to avoid a street-corner full of black or Hispanic men, so instead I used fuzzy accounting to balance my moral checkbook - not to the penny, as I had learned in school - but by rounding down to the nearest ten dollars.

In the wake of yesterday's murder of Erez Levanon, a similar consensus seems to have taken shape here in Israel.  Nearly every news article about the murder latched onto a passing statement made by the security officer of Bat Ayin, Mr. Levenon's town:

"Yaki Morag, the head of security for the small town, told Army Radio in an interview that the area where Levanon was killed was fraught with dangers."

I have no idea if the security officer's statement about the relative danger of the area was unprompted, or if it was in response to questions asked by the interviewer.  But as soon as the words left his lips, they became the kernel around which every subsequent news report was constructed... as if to say:

'Yes, it was tragic that Erez Levanon was brutally killed... but look where he was! What the heck was he doing on 125th street after midnight?!  tsk, tsk, tsk.'

People who wouldn't dream of suggesting that Arab culture is dominated by hatred and death, or that Palestinians view every Jew as a legitimate target, were somehow able to do just that while taking the mental leap to allow a nice chunk of the blame to be shifted quite squarely onto the victim.

But like the younger version of myself who once-upon-a-time had made peace with not balancing my moral checkbook to the penny, many Israelis reading the article about the murder of Erez Levanon performed their own little bit of fuzzy moral accounting and ignored the inconvenient fact that the only way '125th street' could be 'fraught with dangers' is if you have sound reasons to expect dangerous/criminal behavior from the people who live there.

On the few occasions when I've had this very discussion with some of my more 'lefty' friends, they've invariably side-stepped my implied accusation by pointing an accusing finger at 'the occupation' as some sort of blanket justification for any aberrant behavior among a small group of otherwise peace-loving people. 

When I have pursued the argument to the next logical question; 'So when someone sees an Arab at a checkpoint... entering a cafe... getting on a bus... or walking in the woods... how can they tell if this is a 'typical peace-loving Arab' or one of these rare dangerous ones?'  At that point the discussion usually disintegrates into tangents about the evils of 'racism' and 'profiling'... with the result that I've never gotten a satisfactory answer to my question. 

So I throw it out to you, a diverse group of the most reasonable people I know:

1.  Can one reasonably claim that a place is inherently dangerous without acknowledging the source of the danger?

2.  Is it worth making a meaningful distinction between an entire culture being violent and only a few bad actors in their midst acting in a predictably violent manner if the net result to society at large is the same?

3.  Does the [hypothetical] existence of an educated, reasonable, peaceful majority of Arabs who are committed to peaceful coexistence with Israel really matter if they are completely powerless to curb the violence advocated by their leaders and carried out by a small minority of their people?

4.  If you can't safely walk down 125th street after midnight, isn't that a problem worth fully acknowledging and maybe even addressing... or is it safer (physically and morally) to simply cede the night and the territory to those who would do you harm?