Hamas' October
7 attack on Israel: a primer
Some friends on social media remain
unclear about the following. What did Hamas do in Israel on October 7? Why have
so many around the world responded with anti-Semitism? Let's take these
questions one at a time.
What did Hamas do in Israel on October
7?
Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and
murdered, tortured, and kidnapped defenseless Israeli men, women, and children,
ordinary civilians doing ordinary things like eating breakfast.
The extensive evidence of Hamas'
atrocities includes the corpses of a father and child tied together with wire
and then burned
alive, and twenty
children tied together and burned; bodies with hacked off limbs and gauged
out eyes; and bodies bespeaking gang rape so severe that victims' leg
and pelvic bones were broken. First responder Asher
Moskowitz found a baby that Hamas had cooked to death in an oven. The oven's
heating element was still attached to the corpse.
Captured terrorists offered full confessions.
One said,
"We became animals. We did things that humans do not do." One
confessed that the corpses of young women were raped. Stephen D. Smith reports
that there was "an instruction to bring back the dead body of an IDF
soldier and posthumously crucify him."
Hamas made and shared, via social media,
videos. They videorecorded
the murder of a helpless grandmother, and posted the video on her Facebook
page, so that her loved ones would watch. A child hostage was forced to watch
Hamas videos. If the child cried, Hamas members pressed a gun to the child. In
videos, terrorists shoot household pets dead.
Ben Shapiro posted a compilation. A YouTube poster responded. "As a US Iraq war Vet I started to watch this episode and stopped … I've seen a lot, done a lot but I caved … Tears streamed down my face as I watched without stopping, without looking away, gritting my teeth ... If I could return to the battlefield and join your brothers and sisters and do what I could to avenge/protect/free those that are captured I would in a heartbeat … I salute Israel … I bow my head in prayer multiple times throughout the day that this evil will end."
"I've seen quite a lot in war zones
I've covered," British journalist Douglas Murray said. "I've
been in Nigerian Villages when a suicide bomber goes into the church on a
Sunday … I've seen exit wounds from children's bodies. "But," Murray
said, the Hamas video "is by some margin worse than anything … The footage
is a level of depravity that yes not even the Nazis did … Throughout the whole thing
the Hamas fighters are in a state of utter elation." They are "delighted
by what they're doing. I really don't want to hear 'Allahu akbar' shouted again
on my streets." Hamas terrorists are "shouting 'Allahu akbar' all the
way through … when they rape and murder all these young women in a room they
shout 'Allahu akbar' the whole time. When they find a young woman hiding under
a table pretending to be dead and they realize she's alive … they're shouting 'Allah
akbar,' they're so elated … One disgusting young Hamas guy shouts from the
phone of one of his victims … 'With my own hands your son has killed ten Jews,'
and the mother [and father are] all shouting 'Allahu akbar' and they're so
proud of" their murderous son.
Mosab Hassan Yousef is the grandson of a
popular imam and the son of a founder of Hamas. In a November 20, 2023 UN speech,
Yousef said, "Imagine a ten-year-old child. I disobeyed Hamas. I was tied
to a post. I was whipped by a top leader of Hamas with an electric cable. With
every lash I lost my breath until I lost my consciousness. This is how they
wanted me to become a violent savage like them." Years later, in prison, Yousef
worked as the scribe for Hamas torturers. He recorded men shoving needles under
their fellow Arabs' fingernails and burning their bodies with cigarettes and
melting plastic. "I had to die many times in order to transcend this
mentality."
Yousef described viewing
Hamas' October 7 video. "Something fundamental in me changed. I think my
life changed forever. I thought that I had seen the worst of Hamas, but nothing
like this. What I saw was very clearly a genocide … what I saw, I could not
sleep last night. I was filled with rage. I don't know if my physical body can
carry such trauma."
"Some of the audience whispered, 'Make
it stop,'" The Daily
Mail reported after international journalists watched Hamas
video. "I leaned against a wall and cried," one said. Some vomited. "I
certainly hope I never see any of the extra footage again," one wrote."
In photos of the audience, journalists are seen with their hands over their
mouths or their arms wrapped across their stomachs.
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand spoke to a special
session of the United Nations. "The horrific acts committed on October 7th
by Hamas are truly indescribable … the footage … takes your breath away at the
sheer level of evil … You can't unsee when you see it, and it haunts you, like
no other image you could ever see … The barbaric acts are acts beyond what we
have seen from ISIS, Al Qaeda … what has happened to women, the types of
dismemberment, the types of sexual violence to degrade them, to bring fear in
their final moments, to bring fear in the eyes of those who had to witness the
atrocities, is unspeakable … the international community's reluctance – even
refusal – to condemn, or even acknowledge [Hamas atrocities] doesn't just
strike fear in the hearts of Israeli women, it strikes fear in the hearts of
every woman and girl around the globe."
Stephen D. Smith is the inaugural UNESCO
chair on Genocide Education, the editor of the Routledge Handbook of
Religion, Mass Atrocity, and Genocide, and the founder of the Kigali
Genocide Memorial, Rwanda. After watching the footage, he reported, "I
have studied genocide in Rwanda, Cambodia, Guatemala, Armenia and the
Holocaust. I have rarely seen such carnage carried out with such fervor in such
short a period of time. As the last frame ended, there was silence. I bolted
for the closest exit … I was there to bear witness to the evidence of genocide."
This genocide, he state unequivocally, is inspired by Islam. "The killers
relate their conquest to Islam. They were killing in the name of Allah, yelling
''Allahu akbar' … while standing over the corpses of dead Jews."
Many Muslims and their allies
celebrated. In Maryland, Imam Mahmoud Abdel-Hady called October 7 "a great
victory." Iran's Sardar Abolfazl Shekarchi called October 7 "the
greatest success of the Islamic world." In Michigan, Dr. Majod Abuarabia,
the medical director of the Karen Wilson Smithbauer Comprehensive Center for
Breast Care, posted an image from the Broadway musical, Oklahoma, with the main
characters dancing to the song, "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning." In
Norway, Sam Suleiman, a nurse, posted a photo of himself in an operating room,
wearing scrubs, making a fist and flexing his bicep to show off a tattoo
reading "Hamas." He smirks defiantly. Dr. Manoj Sen, a London
surgeon, posted to Facebook that "Jews" "are our misfortune."
South African Islamic Scholar Shaykh
Ebrahim Gabriels of the Muslim Judicial Council praised
Hamas terrorists. "They are people who are connected to Allah … You can't
join the Al-Qassam Brigades if you [do not pray] … You must at least memorize
ten parts of the Quran." He received messages from Muslims all over the
world "crying in happiness." South African Islamic Scholar Moulana
Abdul Khaliq said "Every one of us gathered here as one ummah of the
Prophet Muhammad to give a very clear message to the Zionists on the one hand –
that your days are numbered – and to give our solidarity and support to our
brothers and our sisters in Hamas."
Many in the West celebrated as well,
praised Hamas, and condemned Jews. A partial list is here.
Perhaps the most over-the-top post came from Mika Tosca, a man who pretends to
be a woman, who called Israelis savages, pigs, excrement, and on and on and on.
Tosca is, as of early December, still listed as faculty at the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago.
Some Muslims and allies mocked Jewish
victims. In response to the baby killed in an oven, French model Warda Anwar
posted on Instagram, "I wonder whether they added salt and pepper first,
did they add thyme? What was the side dish?"
Sabrina Khan-Williams is an equity and
inclusion teacher in the World Studies department of Tilden Middle School,
Montgomery County, Maryland. Khan-Williams posted on Facebook that the Hamas
attack had been "Debunked!! No music festival attack. Babies were not
burned. Women were not violated … Palestinian's [sic] are being killed and
their organs are being sold." See more of Khan-Williams anti-Semitic,
anti-American, and profoundly idiotic lies at the Daily Wire here.
Many ask, "How could anyone commit
such atrocities?" "Why would anyone commit such atrocities?" And
many have said, "I am shocked!"
In response, one must ask, "Have
you been paying attention?"
I was born in, and currently live in,
Passaic County, New Jersey, which hosts one of the largest Muslim populations
in the US. I love many of these people for the same reasons I love other
people: warmth, strength, reliability, intelligence, creativity, contributions
to society, and kindness.
In the 1970s, a quiet, shy, but also very
beautiful Circassian school chum said to me, "When the time for jihad
comes, if you don't convert, I will have to kill you."
In the 1980s, I taught a class that
included Gidon, a handsome Israeli paratrooper. In 1946, Iraqi Muslims carried
out the Farhud, a notorious massacre of Baghdad's Jews. Over 100,000 Jews left
Iraq for Israel. Gidon descended from this exodus. Gidon spoke Arabic. He went
out of his way to befriend the Muslim Arabs in class. They danced traditional
dances together. One day, unprompted, one of these Arab students approached me privately
and said, "When the time comes, we are gonna kill a lotta Jews. A lotta Jews."
I had to drive Muslim female students to
shelters so that their family members would not murder them because they were
seen in a car with a non-Muslim boy, or because they refused to marry the
Muslim boy their families ordered them to marry. I had to keep secret the
knowledge that some male Muslim students no longer believed in Allah. Their
families would murder them, as Islam demands, for apostasy. On social
occasions, with friends, I watched Muslim females all but crawl and whimper in
front of even their younger brothers; their brothers controlled them, told them
when they could leave the house and where they could go. I listened to young
Muslim females justify polygyny to me. "When the wife gets old and
unattractive and the husband doesn't desire her any more, she can remain in the
house after he takes a younger, prettier woman. So the old woman is not
homeless. It all works out."
My Malaysian students were scrupulously
polite, hard working, focused on returning to their country and achieving great
things for their society. They all, to a man (Malaysia sent no females to our
campus) hated Jews. Jews were not human to my Malaysian students, who, almost
five thousand miles away from Israel, had been brainwashed to hate Jews.
One day a Muslim coworker was standing
next to the campus' large picture windows, affording an expansive view of
Paterson, NJ. He swept his arm across the city's retro architecture, much of it
at least one hundred years old. "Someday soon this will be a smoking ruin.
We will rise up, and you will convert to Islam, or die."
I wasn't shocked on September 11. I wasn't
shocked on October 7. Many more were not shocked. Atrocities committed against
female bodies?
Dr. Wafa Sultan would not be shocked. As
a physician, Sultan witnessed horrors: a raped woman whose attackers had placed
a drinking glass insider her body as a makeshift prophylactic, a wife whose
husband stubbed out his cigarettes on her body, and the physicians who mocked
the woman as a failure for forcing her husband to discipline her so harshly.
Sultan's niece Mayyada was married off to a forty-year-old when she was 11; she
later killed herself. Sultan paraphrases one hadith
as follows: "A man has the right to expect his wife, if his nose runs with
blood, mucus, or pus, to lick it up with her tongue."
Egyptian physician and Muslim Nawal El
Saadawi, who died in 2021, might not have been shocked. In her 1977 book The
Hidden Face of Eve, Dr. El Saadawi
describes being roused from bed as a six-year-old child, dragged into a
bathroom by disguised figures, thrown to the floor, where those monstrous
figures, whom, she suddenly recognized, included her mother, ripped out her
clitoris, causing her immense pain, terror, and bleeding.
El Saadawi wrote, "My blood was
frozen in my veins. It looked to me as though some thieves had broken into my
room and kidnapped me from my bed. They were getting ready to cut my throat
which was always what happened with disobedient girls like myself in the
stories that my old rural grandmother was so fond of telling me … I was unable
to see, and somehow my breathing seemed also to have stopped."
El Saadawi became a physician. She
treated women from Sudan. There, the clitoris, as well as the major and minor
labia are scraped out, sometimes with sharp stones and broken glass. The vagina
is stitched up. "On the marriage night, it is necessary to widen the
external opening by slitting … When a Sudanese woman is divorced, the external
opening" is stitched up again. Estimates are that almost 90% of women in
Sudan have undergone FGM.
Farkhunda Malikzada would not be shocked
by Muslim men's atrocities against Jewish women on October 7. Farkhunda was a
religious teacher at a Kabul Afghanistan, mosque. A corrupt mullah was selling
amulets. Farkhunda objected. In retaliation, the mullah falsely accused
Farkhunda of harming a copy of the Quran. In response to this false accusation,
a mob of Muslim men immediately formed. They filmed their activities. The men
can be seen punching Farkhunda. They stomped her, they kicked her, they
bludgeoned her with sticks and planks, they placed her in the road and ran over
her with a car. The car dragged her body. The mob then yanked Farkhunda to the
Kabul river. There they stoned her and set her on fire.
Amina and Sarah would not be shocked. These
teenage Texas girls were murdered by their father, Yaser Abdel Said, in 2008.
Their father had previously beaten and raped them. Amina and Sarah were just
two of the estimated 5,000 females honor murdered every year. Honor killing is
presaged in chapter 18 of the Quran.
Atrocities against Jews? Ayaan Hirsi Ali
was not shocked.
After October 7, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who
was raised as a Muslim in Africa, wrote,
"I am not remotely surprised." "The worst insult … was to be
called a 'Jew' … some felt justified in killing anyone who so dishonored them
with this 'slur'. I vividly remember sitting with my female fellows in mosques,
cursing Israel and praying to Allah to destroy the Jews. We were certainly not
interested in a peaceful 'two-state solution': we were taught to want to see
Israel wiped off the map … my school's teacher … Sister Aziza … read to us the Quran's
lurid descriptions of the everlasting fire that burns flesh and dissolves skin
– the place reserved for Jews. Sister Aziza described Jews as physically
monstrous, with horns coming from their heads, out of which flew devils that
would corrupt the world. Jews controlled everything, she told us, and it was
the duty of Muslims to destroy them."
Those familiar with canonical Muslim
texts, including the Quran; the hadith, or sayings of Muhammad; and Muhammad's
role as al Insan al-Kamil or the perfect human, worthy of emulation were
not shocked.
The following facts bear repeating until
they are heard by all.
The Quran forbids Muslims from taking
Jews and Christians as friends (5:51). Jews and Christians are the worst of
creatures (98:6). Jews are the worst enemies of Muslims (5:82). Allah turned
Jews into apes and pigs (5:60). Allah cursed the Jews with humiliation and
poverty (2:61). Christians and Jews may be allowed to live so that they can
enrich Muslims with their "jizya," or the tax non-Muslims must
pay Muslims if they, the non-Muslims, are allowed to live. Christians and Jews must
be ritualistically and perpetually "humiliated" (9:29). And of course
the Quran quite clearly recommends eternal warfare, torture and death for
non-Muslims (5:33).
Muhammad committed a genocide of a
Jewish tribe, the Banu Qurayzah. Muhammad inspected the groins of each boy. If
the boy had begun to sprout pubic hair, he was beheaded; if not, he was sold
into slavery. Muhammad ordered the torture with fire of a captured Jew, Kenana
al-Rabi. Muhammad took as his sex slave this tortured and murdered Jew's wife.
Muhammad had also killed the father and brother of Safiyah bint Huyayy. Muhammad
ordered
his men to impregnate female war captives in the presence of their husbands. Muhammad
okayed the murder of an elderly Arab woman. Umm Qirfa was tied to two camels
who were driven in opposite directions till they tore her body in half. Other
Arab opponents of Muhammad were tortured by having their eyes gauged out with
hot iron and their hands and feet cut off. They were then left to die. And the
Quran recommends that non-Muslims be crucified (5:33). According to hadiths,
Muhammad practiced necrophilia at
least once.
One could go on, with accounts from
jihad campaigns over the course of the past 1,400 years. By some accounts
Christians and Jews, in spite of being tortured, murdered, raped, and enslaved
in their millions, have had it easy compared to those of the Indian
subcontinent. Hindu and Pagan lives in Islam are even cheaper than Jewish and
Christian ones. They are literally cheaper – the Islamic price for killing a
Hindu is one sixteenth that of the penalty paid for killing a Muslim.
Kishori Saran Lal was a PhD historian.
He estimates that up to 80 million people died as a result of the Muslim
conquest of the Indian subcontinent. The number is controversial; see here.
A better estimate would be welcomed. Historians acknowledge, though, that the
Muslim conquest of the Indian subcontinent was facilitated by massacres and
cultural destruction that endanger the world to this day. Some pundits identify
the warring neighbors, majority Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan, as the most
likely site where nuclear war may break out.
Horrified by October 7? Yes. Shocked by
October 7? No, not if you have been paying attention to ISIS sexually enslaving
Yazidi women and girls and publicly torturing opponents to death on camera. Not
if you have been paying attention to Boko Haram kidnapping Christian Nigerian
girls and forcing them into sex slavery and suicide bombings. Not if you have
been paying attention to the Taliban poisoning the air and the food at girls'
schools in Afghanistan. Not if you have been paying attention to Muslim Indonesia's
human rights abuses against Christian East Timor, or the half a million deaths
in Darfur.
Why did Hamas do it? The New York
Times, National Public Radio, and the BBC will tell you that Hamas
committed the atrocities it committed on October 7 because of "the
occupation." Gaza was not occupied by Israel. They will tell you that
October 7 happened because Muslim Arabs in Israel want a state of their own.
Any such state would not survive a year. It would be absorbed by larger
neighbors, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, or some other more powerful entity. Then that
state would be used as a weapon to carry out the destruction of Israel that
Muslims have been promising their people and threatening the world with
throughout their history. Jews are the only people who have had a state of
their own on that territory. For the rest of history, it was been ruled by
various empires. Mixed populations, always including Jews, have lived there.
The Hamas covenant promises the
obliteration of Israel. "Israel will exist and will continue to exist
until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it." The
Hamas covenant quotes Muhammad: "The Day of Judgement will not come about
until Moslems fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees.
The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me,
come and kill him."
We are all capable of evil deeds. How
are Hamas atrocities different? When a Christian or a Jew commits an atrocity,
he is violating the consistent teaching of his scripture, and of his highest
and most consistent teachers and leaders. Christians and Jews who commit
atrocities are, when reached by the hand of the law, punished in accord with
the Judeo-Christian tradition. Jews and Christians apologize and make amends. Hinduism,
Buddhism, Confucianism and Paganism do not command adherents to commit
atrocities in order to conquer the earth in the name of the belief system. When
a Muslim commits an atrocity, he is, alas, following orders set forth in the
Quran and hadith; he is conforming to behavior modeled by Muhammad.
Why have non-Muslims around the world
joined in anti-Semitism? One answer is Muslim immigration. Those chanting
"Gas the Jews" in Sydney Australia were largely, as video shows,
Muslims. Another answer is the capture of the institutions. Marxists,
frustrated by the Western working class' insistence on not violently
overthrowing Western Civilization, switched from a class-based revolution to an
identity-based revolution. Marxists and their Woke children sacralized
"black and brown," "colonized," "oppressed" identities.
Muslims noted this and exploited it. Even as they celebrated themselves as
indomitable warriors ready to "obliterate" Israel, they marketed
themselves as the pathetic "oppressed" to the useful idiots of Woke.
The above processes have been advanced
by the West's retreat from a sine-qua-non plank of its very foundation,
the Judeo-Christian tradition. That tradition insists on a single human family.
"God is no respecter of persons," the Bible famously states in Romans
2:11. Galatians 3:28 says, "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither
slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ
Jesus." Rejecting the Judeo-Christian tradition does not result in a
religion-free populace. Rather, it results in a populace that must obey the
tenets of a new religion. Woke rejects the God who created all humanity at once
in Genesis, who loves all equally, and who prescribes the same law for all to
obey.
Woke has reverted to the Pagan concept
of the dominance of identity. Virtue does not equal behavior or merit; virtue
equals tribe. In the Woke economy, "brown" trumps "white."
Counterfactually, Muslims are assigned "brown" identity and Jews are
assigned "white" identity. In fact, of course, Jews are the original
inhabitants of Israel. The plurality of Jews in Israel today descend from
Mizrahis who hail from North Africa and the Middle East. These facts, as with
other facts, mean nothing to Woke. Woke is more invested in myth than in fact.
In trying to understand why
anti-Semitism has flared up among the Woke elite in the West, I've been trying
to understand four men I have encountered on social media. All are white. All
are over sixty. All are published. I know that two of them have PhDs. The
others may as well, but I don't know. Two have taught at the university level.
Tory Baucum is director of the Center
for Family Life at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. A mutual Facebook
friend referred him to me. I discovered that Baucum and I have a shared
interest in monasticism and Poland. We are both Catholic. I looked forward to
chatting with him. We did not end up chatting. He surprised me by posting on my
page for the first time on December 3. He reprimanded me for posting a meme
pointing out that the Quran used by Hamas is in fact the Quran used by all
Muslims. Dr. Baucum said that the meme was invalid because, after all, KKK members
read the Bible.
I was troubled by Baucum's post. He had
not previously talked to me. He didn't know me. I was not a person to him. His
priority was not to be a Christian to a fellow Christian, but rather to bully a
fellow Christian in order to defend the Quran. Though Baucum holds a
prestigious position at a Catholic college, his logic was
"whataboutism" and relativism. His reference to the KKK was a
whataboutism ploy to deflect attention from Hamas and its religious support for
October 7.
The response to his point is, of course,
that when the KKK does bad things, it is violating Christian doctrine. When
Hamas does bad things, it is following its own tradition to the letter. Baucum's
post was relativist. Christianity? No better than Islam. To me, the arrogance
and lack of respect Baucum showed me, combined with a rapid response defense of
the Quran, deploying the unworthy logical fallacy of whataboutism and the Woke
value of relativism felt more like an exercise of Woke religion than
Catholicism.
Mark Shea is a Catholic author. He
posted a
meme analogizing
Mary, the mother of Jesus, with a Muslim Arab woman in Gaza. Respondents
objected, as Shea knew they would. He insisted that objections to his meme was
proof that his favorite bugaboos, white American Christians, were all deluded
and required him, Mark Shea, to tutor them in Christian love. In fact, though,
Mark Shea's post was not, I suspect, about Christian love, but rather about
ego-driven virtue signaling and a need to pick a fight with the white American
Christians he constantly reviles. Shea is white himself and he chooses to live
in a white majority town in a white majority county in a white majority state. I
did mention to Shea directly but gently, that his post smacked of virtue
signaling, and that while he preaches universal love, he expresses hate for
white Christians and especially for Trump voters. Rather than engage with me,
his fellow Catholic, he deleted my post and blocked me.
Shea's post was relativist; there is no
difference between Mary, the mother of Jesus, and a Gazan mother. Women in Gaza
ululated and celebrated October 7. Muslim women have carried out terrorist
attacks. Muslim mothers have vowed that their wombs exist to create jihadis.
They have celebrated their dead sons' status as "martyrs." A
significant percentage of Muslims polled approve of October 7. Not all, of
course, but absent other evidence, one cannot assume that the Gazan woman in Shea's
meme is just like Mary.
I feel for the woman in Shea's photo. I
also feel for the Germans who suffered during World War II. I know that their
suffering was caused by Hitler, not by the Allies. The suffering of the Arab
woman in Shea's photo is caused by Hamas, not Israel's attempts to protect
itself against the future October 7 attacks that Muslims promise.
Shea's meme expresses Woke religion.
White American Christians are bad, and need to be provoked, and once they are
provoked, they need to be condemned. Condemning white American Christians is
the most important thing to do after October 7. Doing the ethically demanding
work of understanding when and how much violence is justifiable can be ignored,
as long as you can shout that white American Christians are racist. Shouting
about the racism of white American Christians is the easy thing to do in Woke
religion. Confronting the fact of so-called "brown" men who feel
proud about murdering babies and raping women to death is evidently too
difficult for Mark Shea. He earns no points, no clicks, no "likes"
for doing that complicated and easily misunderstood work, so he sticks to
rituals that elevate him. This is ego, not Christianity.
The love that Christianity demands is
sometimes difficult. There is no love without truth. God is love, and God is
also truth (1 John 4:16, John 14:6). Someone who truly loved the Arab woman in
Shea's meme would not exploit her as a cudgel to beat up on chosen enemies.
Rather, a Christian who truly loved that Arab women would take the time to
learn the truth and speak the truth to her. "You voted in Hamas. Hamas is
evil. Its ideology is evil. Choose a different ideology. "You shall know
the truth, and the truth shall make you free." "He who lives by the
sword perishes by the sword." As long as Shea doesn't care enough about
the Arab woman to say that to her, even in the easy venue of a Facebook post,
he does not love her.
Facebook friend "Paul" is a
published and prize-winning author, PhD, and university professor. Paul has
thousands of followers who regard him as a quasi religious leader. He is a
voice of virtue and compassion. Though raised Catholic, Paul is an atheist. He
often mocks Christians, Christianity, and Jesus. When he does so, he is
applauded. He is seen as righteous, as puncturing a destructive belief system.
Paul posted an article arguing that
accounts of Hamas atrocities are false. Paul is "friends" with a
woman who runs a virulently anti-Semitic Facebook page. She posts images of
Jews as pigs, for example. After Paul criticized accounts of atrocities as
exaggerated, he "liked" one of her posts insisting that Islam is
peaceful.
Paul posted material condemning war. I
reminded Paul that his ancestors, in Europe, suffered under the Nazis, and
warriors like my father, a combat sergeant, liberated them. Paul was unmoved. He
insisted that war accomplishes nothing, and no side is better than the other.
Again, relativism. American soldiers liberating concentration camps; the IDF
fighting to keep Israelis safe; Nazis; Jews murdered by Nazis; Hamas terrorists;
Jewish women raped to death: to the relativist, they are all the same. One
can't say that one is good and one is bad. In Woke, such differentiation would
be a sin. In Woke identity as "white" or "brown," not
behavior, determines who is good and who is bad.
Paul, again, an atheist who is quite
hostile to Christianity, posted a frequent claim of anti-Christian atheists,
paraphrase, "All religions are the same. All religions are about
love." In fact, of course, religions are not the same, and all religions
are not all about love. Hinduism and Buddhism focus on transcendence.
Confucianism focuses on family and orderly society. Islam means
"submission." Ironically, atheists acknowledge that they value the
essence of Christianity – love – by insisting that Christianity's teachings on
love are nothing special; are, rather, found in all religions.
To prove that Islam, just like all
religions, is all about love, Paul quoted Quran 4:36. Paul does not realize why
his citation is, at best, inadvertently funny, and, at worst, very dark. Paul
endorsed a verse from the Quran chapter entitled "Women." A verse
previous to Paul's cited verse, 4:34, announces that men are superior to women,
it recommends hijab, and it tells men to beat their wives. The verse Paul
cites, 4:36, uses a coded phrase, "those whom your right hand
possesses," to refer to treatment of sex slaves. Paul equates a Quran
verse about treatment of sex slaves to the world-changing teaching of the Good
Samaritan parable.
Finally, there's Facebook friend
"Jim." Jim is a PhD and a successful businessman. He's an atheist and
aggressively hostile toward Christianity. He astounded me a day after October 7
with brutal verbal bullying of an Israeli friend who is in the line of fire and
must frequently retreat to a bomb shelter. Jim used coded words often used by
anti-Semites. For example he called my Israeli friend "tribal." And
not just that. He repeatedly analogized Israelis to Nazis. He falsely stated
that Israelis are genetically German, that Jews living in Judea and Samaria
demand "lebensraum" and that Zionists are Nazis. I was shocked by
Jim's statements. I did not know that in addition to his Christophobia, he is
also anti-Semitic.
My best understanding of Jim, Paul,
Shea, and Baucum runs like this. All are successful, professional American men
who are used to being on top. Being on top in the West right now requires
accommodation to Woke. Further, Woke flatters and meets the needs of elites to
feel superior. All of their posts struck me as arrogant. All of their posts
expressed this sentiment: "You silly people don't really understand world
affairs. I do." In order to have the superior interpretation, one must
have an interpretation that is different from the mainstream. It is normal – it
is conventional – to be upset by terrorists placing babies in ovens. A speaker
insisting that he commands unique information, that those accounts are false,
elevates his own status. A speaker insisting that he alone knows that "war
is bad" or "war is sad" or "attractive women are killed in
war" while at the same time insisting that others aren't aware that war is
bad and sad and that attractive women are killed in war, or that others don't
care that attractive women are killed in war because those women are
"brown," sets the speaker apart from the mob.
The analogizing of Jews with Nazis, it
seems to me, may also spring from arrogance, egotism, and envy. The Holocaust
was many things. To a decent, normal person, one thing the Holocaust was an
event that requires us to be especially conscious of the sanctity of Jewish
life. No, Jewish lives are not worth more than other lives. But many hold
Jewish lives horribly cheap, and therefore decent people take an especial stand
for the sanctity of Jewish life. I think that arrogant narcissists envy and
resent that special status accorded to Jewish life, and, in egotistic rebellion
and envious rage, kick against it by analogizing Jews to Nazis.
I don't know if I'm right about Baucum,
Shea, Paul, and Jim. Like everyone else, at this difficult time, I'm just
struggling to understand the answers to the above questions.
Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
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