On Saturday night, the Israeli military made a macabre and horrifying discovery: the slain bodies of six hostages taken by Hamas, including American citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin. All six hostages had been shot point-blank in the head some 48-72 hours prior, presumably upon the approach of IDF soldiers; Hamas terrorists chose to murder the hostages they had held in terror tunnels for over 300 days rather than risk their liberation.
The discovery sent the entire nation of Israel into mourning. On Oct. 7, Israelis were forced to remember that the enemy they face is not merely violent, but purely evil. In subsequent months, with the extraordinary progress of the IDF in Gaza over the protestations of the Biden administration, Hamas’ evils were relegated once more to the realm of military conflict. But the very thought of these victims – Goldberg-Polin, 23; Eden Yerushalmi, 24; Ori Danino, 25; Alex Lobanov, 32; Carmel Gat, 40; and Almog Sarusi, 27 – suffering without sunlight, food or water for nearly a year, all to be shot to death within hours of their possible freedom, reopened all the wounds of Oct. 7.
It turned out that all the diplomatic overtures made by America – overtures largely accepted by the supposedly intransigent administration of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – meant nothing. As Netanyahu pointed out, “whoever murders hostages does not want a deal.” That was predictable enough, given the fact that Hamas’ chief goal is its own survival – a goal directly at odds with Israel’s necessary goal of extirpating Hamas. That is why Hamas has consistently declared for months that there would be no hostage release without a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, along with the discharge of hundreds of convicted terrorists and murderers. Anything less than survival for Hamas is a loss. Dead Palestinians help Hamas achieve its goal of pressuring Israel; dead hostages help Hamas achieve its goal of pressuring Israel.
And yet the immediate response of America and Great Britain has been to push Israel into more concessions. Asked whether Netanyahu had done enough to secure the hostage release, President Joe Biden – fresh from the beach in Delaware – said “no.” That is obviously political madness; if the murder of hostages wins indulgences, surely Hamas has the incentive to murder more hostages. But it is, far more importantly, moral madness; handing a victory to the very monsters who currently hold toddlers and threaten to shoot them in the head is the essence of cowardice. It’s worse: it’s complicity in evil.
The only possible moral frame in which Israel can be blamed for Hamas’ monstrousness is a relativistic one, in which barbaric evil can be projected onto the “root cause” of the West. There is a reason so much of the left views America’s loss of the Vietnam War as a victory, or sees the Afghanistan pullout as a triumph, ignoring the viciousness of the Viet Cong and the Taliban. In this view, the cruelty of the West’s enemies is merely a response to the West’s own cruelty – and the evidence of that proposition is the existence of our enemies. Were we kind, generous and tolerant, we would have no enemies, goes the logic – thus the presence of our enemies demonstrates how fatally flawed we are.
This perverse philosophy gives ammunition to the world’s worst human beings. Depriving evil actors of agency means leaving them free to pursue their worse designs, secure in the knowledge that the more savagely they act, the more they will be excused for their cruelty. The West, in this view, can never triumph but through surrender.
This philosophy will destroy the West from within as well as from without. Cowardice is the greatest aid to evil; in fact, it is its own form of evil, for without it, evil could never win. A West incapable of distinguishing between those who kidnap and murder hostages in pursuit of Islamist theocracy and those who seek to free those hostages is a West that simply cannot survive.
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