Only Somber Thoughts Today (posted 10/9/23)

In my usual Monday column, I try to help start your week with a few laughs by mocking our national political idiots, but I can’t do that this morning.  Like most of you, I’ve spent the last couple of days watching the disgusting, cowardly attacks on Israel by cruel terrorists, and I’ve been vacillating between being heartsick and furious. 

And right now, furious is out in front by a long stretch.   

So since it’s too soon for me to put together a carefully constructed column, I hope you’ll forgive a more disjointed attempt to collect some of the thoughts that have been running through my head this weekend.

The hardest part of my Christian faith has always been the idea of turning the other cheek.  In my more contemplative moments I can see the wisdom of forgiving those who sin against us, and I admire some believers who are pacifist.  I’m glad that Christ is loving and merciful, because I need forgiveness and mercy on a depressingly frequent basis.

But I also believe that there is such a thing as righteous anger, and a responsibility to be violent in defense of the innocent and against those who initiate violence.  The Old Testament “eye for an eye” has always resonated strongly with me.  (In fact, I’m glad that for the Jews, the Old Testament is their ONLY testament.  In the coming days, I wish them good hunting and good, old-fashioned smiting of evildoers.)

I know that over the centuries, the Church has debated the justification of the death penalty, and the context for what constitutes casus belli, and it is that ethical framework that underlies our modern conceptions of war crimes and the sanctions provided by the Geneva Conventions.   

And when terrorists like Hamas violate all moral standards – engaging in terrorism, targeting civilians and non-combatants, murdering captives, not wearing uniforms that mark them as legitimate combatants – they are clearly not entitled to any benefits or consideration of Geneva or any other rules of war.

Along those lines, I’ve always loved the sniper character Private Jackson (played by Barry Pepper) in Saving Private Ryan, because I think he embodied a righteous man in war time.  Early on he wryly says, “Well, it seems to me, sir, that God gave me a special gift, made me a fine instrument of warfare.” 

And as he uses his sniper rifle to shoot the enemy and protect his squad, he recites parts of Psalms: “Blessed be the Lord my strength which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight.  My goodness, and my fortress; my high tower, and my deliverer; my shield, and he in whom I trust.”

I’m not one of those believers who claims to know the mind of God, but my best guess is that He would be pleased with that attitude. 

Very rarely does history provide examples of wars in which virtue is almost all on one side.  Many wars are like the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s – bad actors on both sides, fighting for bad reasons, and with routine atrocities on both sides.  In such cases, the wise course for non-involved countries is probably what happened then: a pox on both sides, and stand aside and allow them to keep killing each other. 

Also fairly common is the 60/40 moral mix of most wars.  Examples might be a lot of tribal wars where two aggressive groups clash, or the wars of late Rome vs various Gauls, Franks and Germanic barbarians.  In such cases, both societies are deeply flawed, aggressive and exploitative, etc., but one is usually more in the wrong, if only because they started the war.

Most modern wars also fit this pattern.  The czars of Russia were oppressive, but the communists were much worse.  Pre-Castro Cuba was corrupt, but Castro out-did them.  The Shah of Iran was bad, and his secret police the Savak were brutal, and rightly deserved their comeuppance.  But the weird-beard Ayatollah and his murderous followers were much worse; the numbers they slaughtered in their first months in power far exceeded the victims of the Savak over many years.

But Israel vs. its jihadist, genocidal neighbors is the rare exception.  Yes, Israel is full of humans, and thus sinful in the way all humans and nations are.  But the fashionable leftist insistence that both sides are morally equivalent (or often, that the jihadists are morally superior!) is a damnable lie.

Israel is a democracy and has allowed many Muslims to co-exist with full civil rights in their country.  There are Arabs in their Knesset.  Meanwhile, as Muslim control grew in every Arab country, Jews were increasingly persecuted and killed until the survivors were forced to flee.  Needless to say, there are no authentic democracies amongst Israel’s neighbors, and no Jews on any of their governing councils.

The Muslim countries all have drastically failed the “how’s that working out for you” test.  Beirut was once known as the Paris of the Middle East before civil war broke out in 1975.   Many Arab countries’ women had human rights, including the chance to go out in public while not smothered in a beekeeper outfit.  Their economies were not first-world, but neither were they the dregs of the third world.  Homicidal religion and brutal repression have ruined all of that.

Meanwhile, Israel has been thriving economically, culturally and technologically.  Israelis have more civil rights and freedom than their neighbors, and they’ve created a wealthier and more successful society.  Israelis earn a disproportionate share of patents, Nobels prizes, etc.  (Ironically,  Hitler was defeated in part because the Jews he’d driven out had an outsized role in developing the advanced weapons that eventually kicked his socialist arse.) 

Israel’s modern re-birth was controversial, and when five neighboring countries immediately attacked them, they met violence with violence.  Since then, Israel doesn’t start wars, and when they’re forced into them, they fight much more humanely.  They avoid civilian casualties as much as they can, in sharp contrast to their enemies, who target civilians, and use their own civilians as human shields. 

After Saturday, here’s the least our country can do: immediately stop every dime of aid going to any country who contributes to attacks on Israel in any way.  (Biden should be raked over the coals for having restored aid to “Palestine” that Trump had cut off!)  We should do our best to break and immiserate the Palestinian Authority and Hamas: no trade, no medical aid, nothing.  

We should also immediately slap every possible sanction on Iran, and give Israel any help we can in bombing their nuke facilities, which shouldn’t exist in the first place. 

Two of the saddest things about this tragic attack is that too many people in America and the West are stupid or malicious enough to support the “Palestinians,” and that the majority in Gaza fully support this barbarism.

We should make a full-throated moral case against the “stand-down” appeasement chorus in our own country, and in Europe.  Already at least 57 student groups at Harvard have signed on to a joint statement that begins, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence…” 

In a sane world, we’d immediately expel every one of those idiots, and deport those who aren’t US citizens. (I’d like to think that many of them are foreigners, but I’ve seen enough of our education system to know that that’s probably not true.)  We would also force all American politicians from mayors on up through Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar to take a position on this issue, and if they were honest enough to defend their vicious co-religionists, that should make them toxic to most American voters.  (Sadly, not all.)

In the meantime, any companies who have Harvard grads showing up for job interviews should find out if they signed on to that Nazi joint statement, and then blackball them.

One of the worst things about wars is the civilian casualties, but in this case, a disgustingly high proportion of “civilians” in Gaza are going to deserve what they get.  The stats that were posted here on the frighteningly high proportion of Muslims worldwide who approve of jihad and sharia (and all of the gay-stoning, honor-killing, and infidel-exterminating that goes with it) are well established.

And that societal sickness has been on full display for the last 48 hours.  All over the world, Muslims have been celebrating in the streets, just as many did on 9/11.  Not all Muslims (of course), but it’s a huge red flag that entire Muslim communities are doing nothing to stop the ghouls in the streets, including in Western nations where they cannot be said to fear the jihadi governments’ reactions if they went out and opposed the savage celebrators. 

And look at the streets of Gaza, packed with jubilant a-holes, chanting “Allahu Akbar” and spitting on the naked corpse of a defenseless woman the brave, armed jihadis had beaten and then murdered.  When I saw that footage, I found myself fantasizing about a squadron of A-10 “Warthogs” circling the city.  (For those of you who don’t follow military aviation, the A-10 is an ugly, nearly indestructible ground-support warplane that is basically a flying platform for the biggest Gatling gun cannon ever.  Instead of a plane with a gun, it’s a gun with wings!) 

I imagine the first Warthog pilot starting his strafing run down that street, and I’d love to see the faces of those cowardly scumbags as they stopped dancing around that poor woman’s broken body and looked up to see the first of a line of 30 mm shells tearing up the street toward them. 

Ugh.  This weekend has not brought out the best in me.  And I know that Israel is going to face terrible choices, including how to kill all the terrorists who badly need killing, while they are holding Israeli hostages and hiding behind women and children. 

But we know that what we have been doing – restraining Israel, giving aid to jihadist governments and tolerating jihadi-sympathizers in our midst – has brought us to where we are today.  

The moral equivalence argument is not just wrong, and it’s not just naïve.  It’s evil.   As a very old book says, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.”  The Israelis know that book well, and they know the Psalms of David, too. 

I hope that the Mossad and IDF have done their homework, and know the identities of everybody in Hamas who ranks higher than the foot soldiers.  And I hope they end up killing all of those evil people, in big bunches and individually.  And after that, start on the foot soldiers. 

And all the while, before and during every attack, I hope they’ve got these words on their lips: “Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight…”

Hamas delenda est!