Israel at War—Barbarians at the Gate

On the day before the awful anniversary of the barbarism visited on a tiny Jewish nation by a group of Islamists so consumed by hate that they cannot look inward and judge their own parasitic existence, I'd like to take a broader look at where we are.

In an excellent speech, Konstantin Kisin brings a ray of hope for those of us who feel beleaguered by the atrocities and hypocrisies that we have seen over the past month. Both are evil in their own way.

Evil first took the form of barbarism by a group of Islamists who view themselves and the people they supposedly represent as perpetual victims. They trade in hatred and lies directed outward, because their continual failures at building a meaningful future for themselves and their families are so ugly and unnecessary, that inward reflection would destroy them.

But there was another evil present, and it arose immediately after the Hamas barbarism occurred. Delivered by the radical Left and quietly supported by other leftists and progressives, along with significant numbers of academics and students, and sadly, a more than a few in the Democrat Party, it was an evil that is more dangerous than even the terror delivered by Hamas. It's that evil that Konstantin Kisin discusses in a speech filled with humor, insight and truth—characteristics that are becoming increasingly rare among those who espouse leftist (woke) ideology.

For years now, many of us have been warned that the barbarians are at the gates. We were wrong. They're inside. I'm not going to be all doom and gloom, there are positives as well. Say what you want about Hamas, at least they know what a woman is. But joking aside, I have to be honest, I've been in a dark place these past couple of weeks.

He goes on to talk about a trip with his wife and young son to Bacelona to clear his head. They walked along Las Ramblas and a visited the Christopher Columbus' Statute at the bottom of that long street (I've been fortunate to have been there).

...trigger warning, I am going to talk positively about Christopher Columbus. I know he committed some pretty sizeable microaggressions, but he also changed the world ...

The moral of [Columbus'] story is the history of our civilization was not made by people who always got everything right. It was made by people who made mistakes too. It was made by people who dared to believe they could solve the problems they faced. The story of the West is a story of audacity.

The big debates of the last decade, the "Culture Wars" and the polarization, are about one thing and one thing only: the future. There are people like us in this room who believe our future is to be prosperous and powerful and influential. We are the majority. 

We ARE the majority. We recognize not only the absolute evil in Hamas' kinetic barbarism, but the evil among those who have such a broken moral compass that they find reasons—lies, distortions and hysteria driven by a form of insanity—to support and justify the kinetic barbarism. Kisin argues that their brains are broken:

... there are also some people whose brains have been broken by an excess of education, who believe that our history is evil and we do not deserve to be great. We do not deserve to be powerful. That we must be punished for the sins of our ancestors. To them, our past is abominable, our present must be spent apologizing, and our future is managed decline. My message to those people is simple: "How dare you!" You will not steal my son's dreams with your empty words.

But Jordan [Peterson] is right, we need a positive message too. So here it is: From the dawn of time, human beings have had to work to make the world a better place. We captured the mystery of fire, we invented the wheel, and today we build buildings that would shock and awe almost every human being who has ever lived. We split the atom, we spliced the genome, and we connected the world through microcomputers that fit in our pockets, that allow us to do amazing things.

Have we made mistakes? Sure we have. But on balance, we have recognized that those mistakes can be remedied without destroying our past, without dividing the world into "victims" and their "oppressors" and without an ideology that is based solely on lies that serve an authoritarian narrative whose goal is human control. That's what the Islamist and Leftist narratives are all about—control and the power that control provides. And that is why both ideologies gravitate toward evil.

Kisin completes his talk with these words:

We are in the fight of our lives, and if courage means anything, it means doing the right thing and being willing to take the punishment if you have to. Let me say it again, all death is certain. We do not get to choose whether we live or die, we only get to choose if we live before we die.

Many have been astonished to see the marriage of Islamist and Leftist thinking since October 7th, and the lies and hatred that flow out of each ideology. It's time for the majority who have witnessed what we have witnessed to reject both—forcefully and absolutely. To call out their evil whenever we see it, and ultimately, to defeat them.

UPDATE-1:

Yet again, Gad Saad distills the fundamental battle to it basics:

Sadly a significant minority of Muslims, a majority of palestinians, and all of Hamas, Hezballah, the Iranian regime, ISIS and every other islamist terror group oppose the "maximization of liberties." It is antithetical to how they think societies should be organized.

Instead they feed on hatred of the infidel, crushing anyone who opposes their worldview and subjugating those who remain silent as their liberties slowly erode.

UPDATE-2:

Maybe ... just maybe, there are some Arab Muslims in the M.E. who will publicly recognize that the barbarians at their gate will eat them too. This post on X is encouraging:

All the usual leftist suspects hate Donald Trump with a venon that rivals Hamas' hatred of Jews, but it was Trump's "Abraham Accords" that set the stage for comments like the one above. The Accords were, BTW, abandoned by the Democrats after Joe Biden took office, and lay fallow for 3 years.

It is reasonable to assert that had the Dems continued with the original Accords, the catastrophe we're seeing in the M.E. now may not have happened—not because Hamas would have changed (they wouldn't), but because the broader Arab world may have changed. 

Good work, Dems—another major opportunity lost, and yeah, I know Biden resurrected it recently—too late and half-cocked.