Israel at War—Moral Clarity

There is nothing good that has come out of the Hamas atrocities conducted on October 7th, but there are a few things that are clarifying. The Left has now openly aligned itself with Hamas and its millions of palestinian supporters (no ... the majority of palestinians do NOT hate Hamas). As a consequence, many on the Left have openly adopted anti-Semitic memes (no ... the claim that being anti-Zionist or anti-Israel is somehow not being anti-Jew is absurd and disingenuous) and publicly/enthusiastically demonstrated their anti-Semitism in social media posts and often-violent street demonstrations. Lastly, the propaganda media can now be rightfully characterized as the PR arm of Hamas, working 24-7 to memory-hole the murder of Israeli families, the rape, murder and mutilation of young Israeli women, infanticide and, of course the violent kidnapping of 240 innocents including dozens of small children, all the while reporting fictional Hamas death-toll numbers without even a smidgen of skepticism. Bottom line, the Left has dropped its mask and demonstrated to more moderate Jewish progressives that it is NOT their friend.

But all progressives tend to be fantasy thinkers. Right now, moderate progressives are suffering from cognitive dissonance as they watch their more hard-Left brethren become their true anti-Israel selves. They are repelled by the viciousness that is a trademark of the hard-left, but at the same time, they still buy into the canard that non-Hamas palestinians are just peace-loving people who would sit down and sing Kumbayah if given half a chance. They are appalled by the atrocities committed by Hamas but are aghast at the "human suffering" that is occurring in Gaza. 

They keep telling their friends that all of this is "complex" and that "one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter." They just cannot deal with a hard reality that is expressed by Kurt Schlichter:

Here’s a cheat sheet – going out and raping and murdering people at a rave, bad. Hunting down and blowing into pieces people who go out and rape and murder people at a rave, good.

Being a terrorist is wrong. Being a savage is wrong. Being a barbarian is wrong. But fighting back against them is not wrong. Fighting back against them is a moral obligation and a solid moral good. That’s true even when you have to hurt innocent people while doing it. The business of defending civilization is messy, and “war is hell” is not just a cliché but a fact. Today, all we hear about is the collateral damage levied upon those whom the terrorists hid around. Well, it happens, and it’s legitimate. The fact that killing terrorists means also killing those the terrorists hide behind does not give the enemy a Get-Out-Of-Being-Killed-Free card. Their cowardice does not get to define the scope of our retribution and, to Israel’s credit, it has not. The law of war certainly does not say so. The fact that killing enemy combatants means killing enemy civilians is absolutely within the law of war as it actually reads, and not as some blue-haired 23-year-old with daddy issues says it reads on Twitter ...

It is morally correct for the good guys to destroy enemies who seek to destroy the good guys and, unfortunately, the people the bad guys choose to be around ...

There is nothing moral about stopping the war on Hamas. The only moral course of action is to wipe out every single Hamas terrorist. For the freaks screaming about a ceasefire – and putting aside the Hamas mass murder spree that started this off broke a prior ceasefire – here’s a suggestion. Tell your Hamas buddies to surrender. [1] That would end it. But the freaks won’t ever do that because they do not want peace. They want a Hamas victory. Well, decent people want an Israeli victory, and there should be no ceasefire until every single Hamas scumbag is in chains or in a bag.

Kurt, as is his style, pulls no punches, and that's a very good thing. Good and evil are the original binary. Only the morally vacuous try to find some third state in which barbaric atrocities can be justified by amorphous claims of "oppression" or false claims of "colonization." 

FOOTNOTE:

[1]  Why is it, do you think, that the pro-Hamas Left, who tell us repeatedly and with great passion that they care so, so much about palestinian civilians, are not demanding that their pals in Hamas surrender and release ALL the hostages immediately ... you know ... to stop the killing? That would actually lead to the "#ceasefire" that they demand. But oddly, the Left make no such demands of Hamas. They'd rather chant anti-Semitic rhymes like "...from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free", block traffic, tear down posters of innocent children who have been kidnapped by Hamas, and smash windows.

So ... those of us who recognize their hypocrisy, their moral vacuity, their historical ignorance, and their blatant lies, have coined another hashtag to be used until Hamas no longer exists—#increasefire. [footnote is mine]

UPDATE-1:

At the end of the day, you can judge a group by the alliances they make and the friends they keep. They Left has already chosen to align itself with Islam (and the Jew-Hatred that is endemic is that ideology). It has decided that Islamists are their friends.

The editors of Issues and Insights comment:

So we have a country of 9.23 million, mostly desert, that is only 75 years old, is “surrounded by enemies” and in a constant state of war, which has “no natural resources,” yet “produces more start-up companies on a per capita basis than large, peaceful, and stable nations and regions like Japan, China, India, Korea, Canada, and all of Europe.” It is the only nation outside of the U.S. that Warren Buffet invests in.

Have the Palestinians or Hamas, currently at war with Israel, done anything that compares to what the Israelis have achieved? More broadly, beyond the Allahista terrorist groups, what has Islam contributed to the modern world?

Not much.

Since 1901, Jews, who total 0.2% of the world’s population, have won 189 Nobel prizes for physics, medicine, chemistry and economics. Over that same period, Muslims, who make up nearly a quarter of the global population, have won four.\If it seems as Islamic groups, Hamas and Hezbollah prominent among them, are more interested in spreading nihilism, committing atrocities, and destroying civilization than making the world a better place, well, then there’s a good reason for it. That is exactly what the heroes of an increasingly large number foolish Westerners are aiming for.

Meanwhile, Israelis see themselves “as having a role in the world to repair the world,” says Chemi Peres, managing partner and co-founder of the venture capital firm Pitango, chairman of the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation, and son of the late Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

“We call it tikkun olam, and here at the Peres Center we have a mission statement, which is to introduce innovation and new ideas and new technologies, not only for ourselves but to solve the problems of the world.”

Islam is part of that world, but too many of its adherents live to do just the opposite. 

The Left and their Islamist pals are nihilists. Their goal is to ruin things, to stop others from achieving things, and to drape themselves in moral supremacy that is an illusion. They're very good at it.

UPDATE-2:

The allies and friends of the Left tell us a lot about who they are, and potentially, what they just might be capable of. At a more abstract level, it worth exploring where they come from to help us understand where they might go. Roger Kimball comments:

To some extent, the [Left's] flirtation with evil we see coruscating through the hearts and minds of the constitutionally gullible is just an updated exfoliation of the same sort of raised-fist anti-American animus one saw in among the coddled classes in the the 1960s and 1970s. It is all of a piece with the radicalism of such egregious paragons of prattle as Jane Fonda, Angela Davis, and Susan Sontag. “The truth is,” Sontag wrote in one notorious essay, “that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.” (It is perhaps worth noting that Sontag later regretted that famous last phrase because, she said, it was “unfair to cancer.)”

My sense, however, is that a changed world has made changes in the nature of the radical assaults we see cropping up everywhere in the Western world. An uptick in anti-Semitism is always a sort of canary in the political mine, a reliable indication of brewing mischief. It is a curious fact, not without irony, that anti-Semitism is generally a feature of radical Left-wing activism. The sobering contingency this time is that anti-Semitism is not just a component, a leitmotif, of the protests but almost its main theme. It’s happened before, of course, but it did not end at all well.

Many within the West have embraced insanity. When you normalize the insane, you are only one step away from normalizing and even condoning evil as a means to an end. 

UPDATE-3:

Because the propaganda media controls the flow of information for most people (BTW, that's beginning to change with outlets like The Free Press, X, and Substack) a considerable percentage of Westerners believe that the Leftist anti-Israel/pro-Hamas narrative is the dominent narrative. It isn't.

Here's yet another comment on good and evil by Hillel Fuld:

It might not be politically correct to say, but if you side with Hamas, if you are glorifying Bin Laden, if you are chanting for the genocide of the Jewish people, if you are calling for Israel to cease its fire and let Hamas continue to exist, there really is no other way to say this and I’m sorry I have to be the one to tell you this, but you chose wrong. You chose evil. You are an accomplice to it all! 

It’s not too late to reconsider but if you don’t, and you stand against Israel now, you will be held accountable. 

Hamas has helped clear things up and now the world knows clearly who is good and who is evil. 

And thanks to the internet, there will be no denying where you stood. We see you and we won’t forget. 

The left really, really doesn't like accountability. I just hope it's coming, and I also hope that those who are moderate progressive Jews won't forget what their leftist brethren said and did over the past 50 days.