Intentionally Killing Civilians is Bad. End of Moral Analysis.
Justifying and even cheering the deaths of Israeli civilians marks the final death of any leftist claim to the moral high ground.
On January 7th, 2015, Islamic terrorists stormed the Paris offices of the satiric magazine Charlie Hebdo, slaughtering 12 people, including journalists and cartoonists. Six more people were killed in Paris in related attacks over the next two days. Why? Because the magazine had lampooned the religion of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. The civilized world watched appalled. #JeSuisCharlie (“I am Charlie”) became the anthem of solidarity with the slain. Decent people joined in condemnation not merely of the acts of violence, but of the people who committed it, the organization they belonged to, and the worldview that inspired it. But not all people are civilized and decent. The Islamic far right and their plucky, self-hating sidekicks on the Western far left teamed up to play the world’s smallest violin duet, blaming the victims, blaming bigotry, and blaming society.
The best response to this ethical idiocy came from philosopher Sam Harris:
“Here's one sign that a person, whether he’s on the left or the right politically, has completely lost the plot here: the moment he begins to ask, ‘What was in those cartoons? Were those cartoons racist? Was that a negative portrayal of Mohammed?’ To ask such questions is obscene. People have been murdered over cartoons — end of moral analysis.”
Fast forward to October 7th, 2023. The Palestinian militant group Hamas launched a series of terror attacks in Israeli civilian areas, killing hundreds — including 22 Americans. They fired rockets into neighborhoods, gunned down people in the streets, kicked in doors and slaughtered families, set fire to homes, took captives hostage, beheaded babies, raped women, and stripped their corpses to parade them around the streets of Gaza to jeering crowds. The attacks, carried out during both the Jewish sabbath and the holiday Shemini Atzeret, marked the single deadliest day in Israel’s history, and a turning point for public opinion on the long-standing Israel/Palestine conflict. What has nudged many fence sitters toward the pro-Israel side in recent days hasn’t just been the shocking brutality of these massacres, but also the eye-opening, mask-off bloodlust of the most ardent pro-Palestinian voices, especially on the political left.
Upon news of the slaughter, the civilized world united to mourn the fallen and condemn the killers. The anti-Zionist far left, however, engaged in more than their usual equivocations and apologia on behalf of Islamists. In an act of moral and political suicide that will reverberate for years, our self-anointed preachers of moral clarity have not only found disgusting ways to justify the most barbaric violence against civilians. They have also said the quiet part out loud and evinced a worldview every bit as sinister and dangerous as the fascists they claim to oppose.
In the wake of the attacks, pro-Hamas rallies sprung up in cities across the Western world. Protesters at a Democratic Socialists of America-led pro-Palestine rally in New York City cheered the murder of civilians by Palestinian “liberators.” One protester smugly mock-cried at the death and destruction. Another was seen displaying a Nazi swastika. Not to be outdone, hundreds of people at a pro-Palestine rally in Sydney, Australia chanted “fuck the Jews” and “gas the Jews” while burning Israeli flags. Meanwhile in London, a kosher restaurant was vandalized feet away from a bridge where “Free Palestine” was graffitied.
Over 50 student groups at Harvard University put out a joint statement framing the Hamas attacks as an act of freedom fighters against Israeli colonialists and called on Israel not to militarily defend itself. Other major universities had the good sense not to openly endorse Hamas, but also could not bring themselves to condemn them. If all this seems grotesque, it’s nothing compared to what has transpired online. The following is but a small sampling:
JT Chapman, featured above, also said in a livestream after the attacks that the Israeli captives and victims were not civilians, but rather criminals who had it coming.
The far left has been banging on about “decolonization” for a number of years at this point, but it’s never been totally clear what exactly they meant by such a word, given that colonialism’s heyday is generations past. It appears we now have some clarity. “Decolonization” is just left-speak for ethnically cleansing the right people — which, we now definitively know, includes the Jews. As loathsome as these attitudes are, we should resist the impulse to hate the people who hold them — not only because hatred solves nothing, or that it would be stooping to their level, but because no one can ever hate these folks as much as they hate themselves.
As “decolonization” discourse spread across social media, some critics began asking, in an attempt to reason with Western far leftists, whether they would consider themselves fair targets for violent attacks by indigenous groups seeking to reclaim their land. Leftists bit the bullet and said that they, too, deserve to be murdered in their homes for the crime of existence. This is so far beyond parody it’s no wonder our collective sense of humor is disintegrating. Humor requires exaggerating reality. How is anyone supposed to exaggerate this?:
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In attacking Israel, Hamas knew that it could never hope to achieve military victory. Hamas’s modus operandi is to strike Israel, usually civilians, in order to goad them into retaliation. During the course of the conflict, the militarily superior Israel will invariably kill more Palestinians than vice versa. Hamas uses this disparity to wage their real war, a public relations war currying sympathy (and money) and chipping away at Israel’s credibility on the world stage to defend itself. In doing this, they happily sacrifice the lives, wellbeing, and future of their own people as mere pawns and cannon fodder. It’s an almost supernatural level of cynicism that makes the most sociopathic schemers from Game of Thrones look like Doctors Without Borders by comparison.
Case in point: A Hamas official said, following the slaughter of nearly 1,000 Israeli civilians, that they are now open to truce discussions, since Hamas has “achieved its targets.” We’ve killed about the number of your civilians we were aiming for, so sure, we can talk truce now. This time, it seems, Hamas has overplayed its hand. I will not cheer the deaths of any civilians on either side of this or any conflict. But Hamas has set events in motion that cannot now be stopped. And their Western apologists have aided them, not in advancing toward a better future, but in digging their own graves.
See also: “Israel and Palestine From the 30,000 Foot View”
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There's a quote by Dan Carlin, to paraphrase, if I was a civilian in a disaster in a war, would I think that I was to blame for my country, or would I just feel that I was being grinded in the gears of history? My wife made me turn this off this morning, because she was starting to cry. I have sympathy for those in the gears on all sides.
Bravo!!