Destroying Hamas Is a Moral Duty

In a Wall Street Journal column (subscription required) Walter Block and Alan Futerman declare that Israel has a moral duty to destroy Hamas. They begin by pointing out that Muslim hatred of Israel is not contingent upon any of the usual excuses offered up by the apologists for Hamas' atrocities:

A mob of Islamist Arabs incited by Jew-hatred entered the town and killed as many Jews as they could find. They went door to door, broke into the homes of their victims, and slaughtered innocent men, women and children. These gangs raped, mutilated and tortured them while screaming “Kill the Jews!”

That was 94 years ago, on Saturday, Aug. 24, 1929, in Hebron. The picture is essentially the same, only that then the Arab riots that included this massacre ended with 133 Jews murdered. This time, it is several times as many, and we don’t know the final figure.

Given that the events are virtually the same, the question is: Why? There was no state of Israel in 1929. There were no “occupied” territories, no “settlers.” There was no “blockade.” No security fence, no checkpoints, nothing.

If the excuses of today’s murderers did not exist at that time, what did exist? A deep, maniacal, murderous and utterly destructive hatred of Jews—the same essential factor operating today, to which all other excuses are subservient.

They go on to point out that the ghastly videos of the weekend's raid showing the horrors perpetrated by Hamas were posted online by Hamas members themselves and they ask,

What does it say of a society that these monsters think this type of “propaganda” is a “good” way to mobilize the population? It screams of a deeply perverse and murderous culture, in love with death and destruction.

It is the same culture that teaches toddlers to hate. The same society that pays wages to mass murderers and celebrates on the streets with sweets and shootings when Jews get killed. It is the culture that creates the types of monsters capable of the evil they themselves proudly show to the world through social media.

The authors then turn their attention from Hamas and their supporters and enablers in the rest of the world to their morally depraved sympathizers in the West and they highlight the irony of who these sympathizers are and what exactly they're sympathizing with:

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” chant the useful idiots at elite institutions and parades in the West.

Who are these people? Atheists who support theocratic lunatics, democrats who endorse medieval tyrants, feminists who defend misogynists who parade with the desecrated corpses of women, gays who defend maniacs who would joyfully hang them or toss them off the roof of a tall building.

They talk of a secular, democratic and socialist Palestine. As George Orwell observed: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

And what do the enemies of Israel want? Block and Futerman write that,

The enemies of Israel aren’t in favor of a Palestinian state. They aren’t in favor of anything positive, but only of a negative: the denial of life, especially of Jewish life. The goal is genocide. The method is mass murder of the type Jews haven’t experienced since the Holocaust.

There's no moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas. The people who burn babies to death, who murder children in front of their parents, who rape defenseless women before killing them, who butcher both the living and the already dead are a modern incarnation of the Orcs in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. The authors of the WSJ piece conclude:

[T]he West needs to understand that to defend human life and dignity, it isn’t enough to claim to side with Israel. It needs to understand what this means: total, unrestrictive support. That is nothing less than allowing this beleaguered country to defend itself fully.

To recognize that Hamas needs to be destroyed for the same reason and by the same method that the Nazis were. Israel is entitled to do whatever it takes to uproot this evil residing next to it. And, more important, that once it begins to proceed in that direction, it won’t be demonized for defending that which is the core of Western civilization and which its enemies hate the most: the love of everyone’s right to human life, dignity and happiness.

In other words, it needs to support a complete, total and decisive Israeli victory. If this implies an overwhelming, unprecedented use of military force, so be it. Hamas is and will be responsible for any civilian casualties. Cause and effect. They created their own destruction, and its consequences.

Israel has a moral right to finish the job, and the West has a moral duty to support it. Let Israel do what it must to finish this war in the fastest way possible, with the minimum civilian and military casualties on its side.

I want to emphasize that the authors are referring here to "minimum civilian casualties" among Palestinian civilians which Israel has always tried very hard to protect despite Hamas' repeated use of their own people as human shields. In any case, if the Israelis allow Hamas to survive then the grisly horror we witnessed unfold last weekend will be reprised just as soon as Hamas feels strong enough to carry out such an attack again.

Whatever consequences befall the long-suffering Gazan Palestinians in the weeks ahead, they are the result of the evil decisions made by their own political leadership whose depraved hatreds have brought upon their people all of the misery and grief entailed by the Israeli response.