Think First

 As I’ve said many times before, if liberals remain confused about Islamic extremism, the appetite for right wing authoritarianism is going to continue to grow throughout the West. We need to do everything we can to avoid this.

Hold on to that thought.

That is how Sam Harris wrapped up a recent podcast the transcript of which you can find here in which he castigates in no uncertain terms the lack of thought (my term, Harris is more direct by using terms like sheer ignorance and outright stupidity) that pervades the current movement at college campuses, protesting the ongoing war in Gaza.

I have a few gripes with Harris's piece, namely that, as in previous podcasts, he does little more than pay lip service to the unspeakable humanitarian crisis that has befallen the people of Gaza. No matter which side you are on in this debate, or like me you take no sides between the Israeli and Palestinian people (if not their respective governments), it is impossible to ignore the pain and suffering of the millions of Gazans who want nothing more than to simply live their lives.  

As I've stated in earlier posts, the argument of who has the moral high ground is meaningless when it comes to tens of thousands of innocent people killed, and many, many more injured, displaced, their lives forever altered and their future seriously in doubt. The fact that probably half of these innocent people are children compounds the tragedy logarithmically,

Every decent human being should mourn their loss and grieve over the bloodshed that goes on to this day.

Nonetheless, I have to say I agree with more of what Sam Harris has to say than disagree.

To put it simply, as brought up by a friend, "Why is no one protesting against Hamas?"

On October 7th of last year, Hamas was, and continues to be, the de facto government of Gaza. Therefore, the unprovoked and unspeakable attack they carried out that day against the people of Israel, besides being vile and reprehensible in every sense of the words, was an act of war, no different than Germany's unprovoked invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, no different than Japan's unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

As such, Israel had every right to declare war against Hamas.

Today, people of good will all over the world are calling for a cease fire, for an end to the killing, for the Israeli hostages still being held by Hamas, alive or dead, to be released and for both sides to come together and negotiate peace. 

That's all well and good, but there's a big problem.

The stated goal of Hamas is the destruction of Israel, it always has been, and continues to this day.

We could argue all day and all night for the rest of our lives about the merits of the creation of the State of Israel three generations ago, after the Holocaust, but the fact of the matter as I've also repeated over and over again since last October is that Israel, a sovereign state since 1948, is not going away. 

Neither are the Palestinians.

Therefore, some reasonable compromise must be negotiated in order for there to be any semblance of peace in the region, a long shot at best but what other choice do we have?

It is impossible to negotiate when one side in a war is unabashedly devoted to the complete destruction of the other side. Hamas is not interested in making peace with Israel in the slightest.  As long as Hamas continues to have any teeth left, we can expect acts like what took place on October 7, Israel's equivalent of 9/11, to be commonplace, obviously, unacceptable for the Israelis.

Therefore, from the Israeli point of view, which is not unreasonable in the slightest, Hamas must be destroyed or at the very least, its ability to wage war, eliminated.

Make no mistake, Hamas knew exactly what they were doing in the planning and carrying out of the October 7th attacks. They understood full well that Israel would respond with deadly and overwhelming force and that the vast majority of its victims, fellow Palestinians, would be innocent civilians, including children. They knew that because Hamas routinely uses its own people as human shields, intentionally placing them in harm's way between their fighters and the Israeli military. Any chance of taking out Hamas fighters in battle inevitably leads to civilian casualties. And Hamas understood all too well that the outrage over the carnage would cause support for themselves around the world among otherwise well-intentioned people who refuse to look beyond their own biases, or simply won't bother to dig any deeper than the proverbial ten second soundbite.

It was all by design, the blueprint for the slaughter of 30,000 and counting Palestinians in Gaza since October 7, 2023 was brought to the world courtesy of Hamas, pure and simple.

For their part, Israel is continuously lambasted for not having responded "proportionately" to the Hamas attacks, as the current toll of Gazans killed is well over 30,000, while around 1,200 Israelis were killed on October 7.

But what does a proportionate response even mean? Should Israel's response have been tit for tat, in other words, would the war have been OK if they had stopped at 1,200 dead Gazans?

To put it into perspective, 2,403 U.S. military service members died as a result of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the event which resulted in the U.S. declaring war on Japan, thereby entering World War II.

By that war's end nearly four years later, in the words of retired U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley:

…we (the United States) destroyed 69 Japanese cities, not including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We slaughtered people in massive numbers – innocent people who had nothing to do with their government – men, women, and children.

I would add that during World War II we also fire-bombed German cities, causing the pain and suffering of innocent civilians some would argue, far more agonizing even than that caused by the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This in no means is to minimize or trivialize the suffering and death of innocent civilians in fact, quite the opposite.

During a recent conference at the Carter Center in Washington, General Milley, who brought up other examples of civilian casualties caused by the actions of the U.S. military, including those in which he participated said: 

War is a terrible thing, but if it’s going to have meaning, if it’s going to have any sense of morality, there has to be a political purpose, and it must be achieved rapidly with the least cost, and that you do by speed.

Here I would question as in the case of Sam Harris, Milley's use of the term "morality", as that term when applied to war is fraught with much difficulty. A war can be just, it can be a fight for survival, but can there ever be a moral war? The answer to that question is way out of my pay grade. 

But Milley got to the crux of the matter when he commented on the overt support for Hamas on American college campuses:

They’re out there supporting a terrorist organization, whose very written charter calls for the death of all Jews – not just in Israel, worldwide. I mean, come on now. If you’re going to support that, you’re on the wrong side.

If you have doubts about Milley's remark about the "death of all Jews" as I did, please refer to the last sentence in Article Seven in The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas's 1988 manifesto) which you can find here.

Article Six of that document gets to the real motivation of the group, which can be heard in the popular chant heard on university campuses throughout the U.S.: 

Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.

In other words, the entire land that is now occupied by Israel. But not to fear says the text:  

(Hamas) strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine, for under the one wing of Islam followers of all religions can coexist in security and safety where their lives, possessions and rights are concerned.

That last part sounds all well and good until you talk to residents of other utopian Islamic theocracies such as the biggest supporter of Hamas, Iran. 

Truth be told, many of the Jews who represent about one hundredth of one percent of the population of Iran, (that number was a lot higher before the Islamic Revolution of the 1970s), claim to be free to practice their religion in Iran without much governmental interference. 

The same cannot be said of members of non-Abrahamic faiths such as the largest religious minority in Iran, the Baha'i, whose members have been routinely persecuted ever since the Ayatollahs took over. 

The same certainly cannot be said for members of the LGTBQ community.

Nor for women who choose not to conform to the dress code of Iran's morality police. Just ask Mahsa Amini when you meet her in heaven, or the nearly 500 people killed there while protesting her death.

The saddest part is that Iran is a paradise for those groups and others who don't toe the hard line of the religious zealots, compared to places like Afghanistan under the Taliban, and portions of Syria and Iraq under the control of the Islamic State.

Now you might say I'm just cherry-picking extreme examples of radical Islam that have little relevance to the political group that is currently in control of Gaza who are merely "fighting to bring justice to the Palestinians". 

Well, the following is Article Eight of the Hamas Covenant in its entirety:

Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.

If that doesn't send shivers up your spine, I guess nothing will.

Quite difficult it is to negotiate with people who are not only willing and eager to kill you and annihilate your people, but are also willing and eager to die themselves, or at least send their underlings who are more than willing to die for them.

Yet here we are.

I disagree with Sam Harris when he intimates that what we've been seeing on college campuses since October 7 is driven primarily by antisemitism, equating it say with the tiki torch carrying, swastika wearing mob in Charlottesville, VA chanting "we shall not be replaced." 

Rather in my opinion anyway, what's driving these protests beyond a genuine concern for the people of Gaza, is the myopic point of view held by many in contemporary academia and in the Left of hostility towards and rejection of the dominance of western culture, manifestly expressed through colonialism. 

That said, the widely reported harassment and assaults of Jewish students by protestors and the faculty members who support them is, if not outright antisemitism, then a good impersonation of it. So is openly calling for intifada. And so is calling for an end to the State of Israel. 

Beyond the lack of thought, (I'll be generous and leave it at that), beyond the catchy radical chic chants and slogans, beyond the misguided efforts of many Americans to address the complexities of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict with a one-size-fits-all solution, is a profound failure to look at the big picture. 

As I wrote above, the war in Gaza is an unspeakable human tragedy. But innocent lives will not be spared by the efforts of protestors however well-intentioned, who haven't thought the whole thing through.

As Sam Harris suggests capping off his podcast, the movement on U.S. college campuses to condemn Israel and only Israel in the war in Gaza, is a godsend to right wing political extremists who exploit the chaos and lawlessness of the demonstrations, which they greatly exaggerate of course, the tacit support for an extremist, terrorist organization which cannot be denied, and most of all the antisemitism, both real and perceived, to gain a foothold among American voters who are not on the margins of the political spectrum, by claiming the moral high ground on this issue.

Far more serious is the perilous division it is causing among Americans who honestly value the rule of law as proscribed by our Constitution, free and fair elections, freedom of expression, the separation of church and state, the promoting and nurturing of ethnic and racial diversity, reproductive rights, the freedom to marry whomever you wish and to live your life however you see fit, and all the other rights made possible by a liberal democracy, which is currently under threat by extremists, both at home and abroad, with a much different agenda.

We've come too far as a nation to let that happen. From time immemorial the modus operandi of totalitarianism is divide and conquer. To those of us who cherish living in a democratic republic and the values that have held this nation together, flawed as it may have been for nearly 250 years, we can disagree on any number of issues but in the end, we can't let ourselves become divided over the big picture. 

If we do, we'll only have ourselves to blame when it all comes to a screeching end. 

Think about it.