The failure to readily identify the battle between good and evil is a nagging, ongoing, dangerous pattern that shows no sign of easing up any time soon.

This week on Fox News Channel, I appeared on a show and “debated” Ibrahim Hooper, a vocal and forceful representative of CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations. The topic? Whether or not it’s a good idea for a group of Islamic folks, represented by a man once linked by the federal government of plotting to blow up buildings and kill innocent Americans, to be allowed to plaster over a thousand subway cars in New York City with advertisements promoting Islam.

I’m not kidding you.

This man, a Brooklyn imam named Siraj Wahhaj, is all over a promotional video hyping the ad campaign for the trains. According to the New York Post, he has said things like, “In time, democracy will crumble, and there will be nothing, and the only thing that will remain will be Islam.”

He was named by U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White as one of 170 unindicted co-conspirators in the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.

The Post reports that he has called the FBI and CIA “the real terrorists.”

And he served as a character witness for “the blink sheik”, Omar Abdel-Rahman, currently rotting in jail for his role as one of the masterminds of the 1993 WTC bombing.

Now, he’s a spokesman for this wacky ad campaign that would attempt to teach people stuck on subway trains in New York City all about the wonders of Islam.

I can’t think of any city on the planet that should have to endure such a cruel taunt. But the idea of doing this to New Yorkers is obscene.

Already a number of NYC officials are calling upon the MTA, the transit agency that runs the subway system, to reject the ill-conceived ad campaign.

This week on the Fox News program, Mr. Hooper attempted to deliver a monologue about what a wonderful man this Siraj Wahhaj is; how those of us who object to the subway ad campaign are trying to prohibit “free speech;” and the old favorite of activists like Hooper, we’re demonstrating anti-Islamic bigotry.

It’s simply astounding that such a debate could even occur in the United States today. Picture what this country felt like in the weeks and months after 9/11. Can you imagine anyone even beginning to allow an advertising campaign promoting Islam, being endorsed and supported by a man the feds believe to be a terrorist, on New York City subways?

And yet we are suffering through the stench of moral relativism. Every position must be countered. Right doesn’t necessarily mean right, wrong might not be wrong.

A brutal, cowardly Arab terrorist who was convicted of bashing a little 4-year old Jewish girl’s head in with a rifle butt is released to Lebanon in exchange for a pair of dead Israeli soldiers. He’s met by adoring, cheering crowds and given a red-carpet welcome.

The Democrat presidential candidate continues to insist that the American military surge in Iraq isn’t really the reason for the overwhelming reduction of violence there.

Our country gives a couple of million minimum wage workers a big hourly pay hike and the mainstream media immediately complains by saying that high gas and food prices make the pay increase irrelevant. And when former Sen. Phil Gramm accurately points out that we’re a nation of whiners and misery sells newspapers, he’s forced to resign from his leadership post in the John McCain campaign.

I yearn for the day when we’ll return to the foundational value that makes this country great. Right and wrong are not relative terms. There are fundamental truths. Evil flourishes, but good men continue to battle it – and win.

Good can and will triumph over evil.

We just have to have the guts to know the difference between the two.