PicoBlog

Note: This series is based on several podcasts I recorded about the events of October 7th and the resulting war in Gaza. Please leave suggestions, criticisms, citations, corrections, etc. in the comments. Subsequent changes to the text will not be marked, but each draft will be given a new revision date here: 6/25/24.

We live amid the tides of history, but rarely know it. To know it is to see a familiar landscape suddenly inundated, and to recognize that anything can happen at any time. On October 7th, 2023, history came flooding in, and we lost our footing. We have yet to regain it. 

In many ways, the atrocities committed by Hamas in southern Israel were worse than the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. To grasp the relative magnitude of these events, Americans were encouraged to imagine Al-Qaeda killing over 40,000 innocent civilians in New York and taking more than 8000 hostages. But this comparison fails to capture the greater proximity of all Israelis to the violence of October 7th, the resulting depth of their anguish, or the legitimacy of their existential fears. Al-Qaeda was never a real threat to America, much less to all her inhabitants. The combined menace of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Republic of Iran puts the lives of all Israelis in peril.

Once reports and images of Hamas’s savagery began appearing online—and long before Israel retaliated in Gaza—we witnessed a great fracturing of public opinion, engineered and amplified on social media. Thereafter, it would be hard to overstate how confused much of the world seemed about the nature of good and evil. This confusion shows no sign of abating.

The lessons of October 7th should have been clear, and they will persist however the war in Gaza ends. Absorbing these lessons does not require that we untangle the wretched history of the region or reconcile the discrepant memories of its peoples. Rather, the moral order of the present can be understood by reference to the present, and by honestly acknowledging what both sides to this conflict actually want. When considering the ethics of any group or population, we should never hesitate to ask: What would these people do if they had the power to do it?

I’ve spent decades observing the danger that religious fanaticism poses to open societies. But all religions are not the same. Today, no place on Earth is likely to suffer repression and terror on account of the Anglican Communion. In fact, there is only one religion that currently threatens to ruin every open society it touches. And while this fact is frequently ignored or obfuscated, the connections between the religion of Islam, Islamist bullying, and jihadist violence could not be more clear. It is time we stopped lying, and consenting to being lied to, about the nature of the problem.

The Christians of the 14th century regularly murdered people for imaginary crimes, like blasphemy and witchcraft. Studying this history, even in a Christian context, provokes amazement and horror. Similarly, when reading a work of fiction like The Handmaid‘s Tale, we effortlessly recognize the evil of theocracy. And yet it is considered a sign of bigotry to notice that similar extremes of religious fanaticism and intolerance can be found in many Muslim communities today.

There are around 50 Muslim-majority countries, and none of them are good places to live if you care about human freedom. This is unlikely to be an accident. Is it a surprise that killing people for apostasy has a chilling effect on free thought? Might the explicit denial of political equality to women have something to do with its absence throughout the Muslim world?

Ideas have consequences. And yet it has long been controversial to acknowledge this truth when discussing the religion of Islam. We don’t even have a standard terminology to guide our thinking. When emphasizing the political dimensions of the problem, the term “Islamism” often seems most appropriate. When referring to Islamists who are eager to die as martyrs for their cause, we generally speak of “jihadism.” Depending on the context we can also use terms like “radical Islam,” “Islamic extremism,” or even “Islamofascism.” Call this belligerent madness whatever you want—what you cannot do, honestly, is claim that it has no connection to the mainstream religion of Islam. This is why a topic that is now central to the health of open societies has become nearly taboo to talk about.

There are several reasons for this:

First, there are some number of actual racists and xenophobes in every western society, and if these people happen to hate Muslims, their bigotry can be used to discredit any well-intentioned concerns about Islam.

Second, Islamists have worked very hard to make any criticism of Islam (as a system of ideas) seem like bigotry against Muslims as people. It would be natural, of course, for Muslims to feel uneasy at having their faith singled out for scrutiny, whether by governments or by the media, but much of this resistance reveals something more sinister—coming, as it does, from genuine Islamists who know precisely how deep their theocratic aspirations run. Throughout the West, we find Islamists (and their apologists) working to increase their political power within a social order that they despise, and which they hope to subvert by using the values and norms of liberal tolerance to undermine liberalism itself. This can take countless forms—from valorizing the hijab as a symbol of female empowerment (when it is, in fact, the most conspicuous means of enforcing gender apartheid throughout the Muslim world), to seeking to criminalize blasphemy at the United Nations, to blaming Salman Rushdie for the fatwa against him and the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists for getting themselves butchered by jihadists. And, of course, there has been no shortage of useful idiots to help in this cause. For decades, western liberals have defended Islamist intolerance in the name of tolerance. There is simply no question that this masochistic folly puts open societies at risk.

And it is here that the term “Islamophobia” is invariably deployed to confuse matters, by conflating any criticism of the ideology of Islam with xenophobia, racism, or an irrational hatred of Muslims as people. And this is why critics of Islam—even those who were born into the faith, speak Arabic, and are non-white—can find themselves described as “anti-Muslim extremists,” and even profiled on the “Hate Watch” page of the Southern Poverty Law Center (a once important civil rights organization that has become a social-justice madhouse). I will address the dangerous canard of “Islamophobia” later on.

A third reason that any special focus on Islam can seem suspect is that many of Islam’s critics harbor other apparent loyalties. Pick any organization that focuses on the spread of political Islam or the dangers of jihadism, and you will often find that it has been founded or funded (or both) by Christian fundamentalists, Orthodox Jews, or Ex-Muslims (some of whom may have since converted to Christianity). While it is natural to view such people has having conflicts of interest, in my experience, their outsized contributions on this topic result from the comparative blindness of secular liberals. Generally speaking, the people who readily understand the threat of radical Islam tend to be devout believers in another faith or former Muslims, because they know what secular liberals often do not: Sometimes, religious fanatics believe exactly what they say they believe. When jihadists shout, ”We love death more than the infidels love life!”—all evidence suggests that we should take them at their word.

Finally, much confusion arises from the embarrassment that western liberals feel over European and American misadventures in foreign lands. There is a lot to be embarrassed about—from the slave trade and the age of colonialism, to the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Add to this unhappy history our frequent collaboration with unpopular regimes that serve our interests, and it seems perfectly rational for many people in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia to view western influence in a negative light. However, as we will see, such terrestrial grievances do not explain the character of the violence we see throughout the Muslim world.

There is no possibility of our living in peace with Islam in its most fanatical forms—and the events of October 7th should have clarified this point beyond any possibility of doubt. The fact that they didn’t, but instead became the basis for further moral confusion, along with the greatest eruption of antisemitism in living memory, suggests that most people don’t understand the malevolent logic of Islamic extremism.

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Cultures differ widely in their attitudes toward violence and in the value they place on human life. In times of war, some people dance in the streets in celebration over the massacre of innocent civilians, while others seek to avoid causing “collateral damage,” and will even prosecute their own soldiers if they gratuitously violate this norm of modern combat.

Certain societies revel in the anguish of hostages and prisoners of war, and will parade them before unruly mobs, allowing them to be assaulted, raped, or even murdered. They will desecrate their bodies, and such carnage reliably produces widespread euphoria. Others find this brutality revolting—and, again, will prosecute anyone on their own side who takes part in it.

In short, there are cultures that revel in war crimes, while others hold the concept of a war crime as a sacred prohibition and as a safeguard for maintaining the moral progress of civilization.

Of course, it is true that western societies have been on the wrong side of these dichotomies in the past. We don’t have to go back far, in fact, to be scandalized by our “civilized” ancestors. If you have any doubt about this as an American, consult photographs of white mobs celebrating the lynchings of blacks in the South in the first half of the 20th century, where whole towns—thousands of men, women and children—turned out as though for a carnival to watch some young man or woman be tortured to death and then strung up on a tree or lamppost for all to see. Seeing images of these people in their Sunday best, having arranged themselves for a postcard photo under a dangling, lacerated, and often partially cremated person, is one thing—but realize that these genteel men and women, who considered themselves good Christians, often took souvenirs of the body home to show their friends—teeth, ears, fingers, knee caps, internal organs—and sometimes displayed them in their places of business.

Of course, there is also the example of Nazi Germany, which we will have reason to revisit below. The point, of course, is that if we would condemn the monstrosities of the past, we must condemn the monstrosities of the present.  

Consider just one point of cultural difference: When armed conflict breaks out, some groups will use human shields, and others will be deterred, to one degree or another, by their use. To be clear, I’m not referring to the practice of taking hostages from the opposing side for the purpose of using them as human shields. That is appalling, and it happens routinely in the Muslim world, but it is a separate crime. Here, I’m talking about something far more depraved—it is astounding, really, that it happens at all. There are people who will strategically force their own noncombatants, their own women and children, into the line of fire so that they can inflict further violence upon their enemies. They do this because they know that their enemies have a more civilized moral code, rendering them reluctant to shoot back, for fear of killing or maiming the innocent. Above all, they know that maximizing the loss of innocent life on their own side will provoke outrage and political conflict in free societies, which place a far greater value on human life.

In the war in Gaza, Hamas fires rockets from hospitals, mosques, schools, and other sites calculated to create carnage if the Israelis return fire—while Israel routinely notifies the residents of buildings it intends to bomb, in an effort to get them to evacuate. In turn, Hamas snipers have killed Palestinian civilians as they fled, to discourage others from attempting to move to safety. There seems to be no bottom to this particular well of evil. Jihadists have rested the barrels of their guns on the shoulders of children, daring their enemies to shoot through their bodies. They regularly force children to be suicide bombers. They have even blown up crowds of children in order to kill western soldiers who were passing out candy to them. If cynicism and nihilism are ever found together in their most perfect forms, surely it is here.

Just try to imagine the Israelis using their own women and children as human shields against Hamas on the morning of October 7th. It is important to recognize how unthinkable this would be. It is unthinkable, not merely for the Israelis to treat their own civilians in this way, but for them to expect that their enemies could be deterred by such a tactic, given who their enemies are.

Take a moment to do the cognitive work: Imagine the Jews of Israel using their own women and children as human shields. And then imagine how Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, or any other jihadist group would respond. The image you should now have in your mind is pure, moral surrealism. It is a Monty Python sketch wherein all the Jews die.

How is it possible to lose sight of the moral distance here? It is like not seeing the Grand Canyon when we are standing at its edge. We must acknowledge what this asymmetry means. We must be honest about what it indicates about the differences between cultures. There aren’t many bright lines dividing good from evil in our world, but this is surely one.

Of course, there is more to consider when thinking about the ethics of war and violence. And there is more to be confused about. For instance, once the war in Gaza began, it seems that most people viewed the deaths on the Palestinian side to be morally equivalent to those of the noncombatants who were tortured and murdered by Hamas on the morning of October 7th. But there is a difference between collateral damage—which is, of course, a euphemism for innocent people killed in war—and the intentional massacre of civilians for the purpose of maximizing horror.

And yet it is easy to see why many people are confused about the war in Gaza— because they have been inundated with misinformation about it. Judging from social media, billions have been told that the Jews are settler colonialists, that they have built an apartheid state in Israel, and that they are guilty of genocide. These lies didn’t start on October 8th. They’ve been promulgated for decades, and it seems that no matter how patiently they get corrected, nothing changes. Of course, the photos and video coming out of Gaza haven’t helped. This is one of the many liabilities of social media. There simply is no political analysis or philosophical argument, however correct, that can make emotional sense of images of dead children being pulled out of rubble.

It is also natural for people to look at the history of conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians and assume that there is a moral equivalence between the two sides. In fact, because Israel is more powerful, many imagine that the responsibility for the ongoing conflict falls primarily on the Jews. Israel is now widely viewed as a bully with advanced weaponry, while the Palestinians are merely victims, mostly throwing rocks. Even in the aftermath of October 7th, when we had an avowedly genocidal, terrorist organization butchering noncombatants, taking women and children hostage, and firing rockets by the thousands into civilian areas, vast numbers of westerners remain convinced that Israel is in the wrong.

The protests we have seen on our college campuses are only possible because people don’t understand the threat that Islamic extremism poses to open societies. What’s happening at these elite institutions may be the product of many factors, but the level of moral confusion sufficient to support Hamas and to demonize the people who are fighting Hamas, requires that one not recognize what Hamas is.

And in a way, this is also understandable. It is natural to imagine that people everywhere are essentially the same. It is easy to see how one might think that normal people would never perpetrate violence of the sort we saw from Hamas on October 7th—methodically burning families alive, raping women and cutting their breasts off and then killing them—and shrieking with joy all the while. Normal people couldn’t do this unless they had been subjected to some unendurable misery and injustice. The Palestinians must have been traumatized to the point of madness by something Israel has done. Leaving aside those who deny that Hamas committed any atrocities on October 7th, given the assumption that people everywhere are more or less the same, the very extremity of the violence seems to put the moral onus on its victims.

This perverse distortion of moral intuition casts a shadow over the entire history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For instance, the fact that the Palestinians could have produced an endless supply of suicide bombers during the Second Intifada—and that they would target noncombatants, even children—was considered evidence that they had been pushed beyond the brink of sanity by the Israelis. Otherwise, normal human beings would never behave in so extraordinarily destructive a way. Again, it is easy to see how uninformed people could make this assumption.

Similarly, secular people tend to believe that groups like Hamas, al-Qaeda, or even the Islamic State, attack western targets for normal political reasons. They think these movements are anti-colonial, or straightforwardly nationalistic. And so they imagine that the depravity of their violence is, once again, the fault of Western powers. The chickens have finally come home to roost.

While understandable, these assumptions have been obviously wrong for decades. To believe any of this now, as most secular people do by default, is to be taken in by a masochistic delusion. And it is a delusion that has been weaponized against, not just Israel, but every western society. Islamic extremists know that secular liberals are simply drunk on white guilt and self-doubt. They can see that our elite institutions have become temples of sanctimony and self-recrimination. They know that if they just use the word “racism”—even though it has absolutely no logical application when talking about the fastest growing religion in a hundred countries—this settles all arguments left-of-center in our politics. They know that good liberals always worry about being the bad guys. They know that our kids find it very easy to believe that we are, and have always been, the bad guys. And they have been manipulating Western society for decades, aided by legions of useful idiots on the Left.

As a consequence, many journalists, politicians, and scholars do not recognize the degree to which sincere religious belief and identity drive conflict in the Muslim world—between rival sects and between Muslims and non-Muslims. At bottom, western society is suffering from a fundamental ignorance of how Islam differs from other religions.

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We cannot judge the moral balance of a war by merely counting the dead. Intentions matter. Whatever the degree of destruction, it always matters what kind of world the combatants are attempting to build. Again, we must ask the question: What would these people do if they had the power to do it?

As has often been pointed out: If the Palestinians laid down their weapons, there would be peace in the region (whether in two states or one); if the Jews of Israel laid down their weapons, there would be a genocide. It is crucial to understand that this isn’t mere speculation, much less hyperbole. Hamas has declared its intentions ad nauseam—from its founding charter in 1988, to its public statements in the aftermath of October 7th. Its stated goal is to exterminate the Jews.

And this goal is widely shared by Islamic extremists throughout the world—even among those who have never met anyone who has met a Jew. If the genocidal character of Islamic antisemitism wasn’t obvious before, it became undeniable once the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the Palestinian Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, met with Hitler and pledged his support for the Final Solution. Lest we imagine that this collaboration merely attested to the antisemitism of one man, al-Husseini cited the authoritative hadith of Bukhari-Muslim, which states:

The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: “Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him” —except for the gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews.

Known as the “Hadith of the Stones and Trees,” this charming prophecy frequently appears in Muslim religious discourse and media. It is even taught to children in Gaza and the West Bank in their schools (many of which are funded by the United Nations). To the surprise of absolutely no one, it also appeared in the founding charter of Hamas.

If most Americans today are better than their slaveholding ancestors, if most Germans are better than their parents and grandparents who herded Jews into gas chambers, if the students protesting the war in Gaza—who are so conscientious as to grow frantic over offenses like “cultural appropriation”—are better than the racists and moral lunatics that lurk somewhere in their family trees, then we must recognize that there is no equivalence between Israel and her enemies. As we will see, to deny that the government of Israel is better than Hamas, or that Israeli culture is better than Palestinian culture­ in its attitude toward violence, is to deny that moral progress itself is possible.

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