by Shmuel Klatzkin
I would have thought myself immune to all this. American public life has been a circus of lies for a while. Outright lies (“I did not have relations with that woman”), carefully parsed technical truths that meant to convey lies (the 50-odd members of the intelligence community, law enforcement, military, and the like who wrote that Hunter Biden’s laptop had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation) — take your pick, we all have our favorites. I was at first completely dismayed, but now, it’s already baked into the price, as they say on Wall Street: Rather than wait for the crash, the value of the discourse is already steeply discounted. Such is our politics.
| Hamas are inhumane monsters, where cruelty is not the means to an end — it is the end itself. Inflicting cruelty and pain and suffering is their mission. —Lee Kern |
But one thing I thought would gain no traction in America was Hamas. Its propaganda has never made more headway with the American public than the little newsletters that used to come from the woods past Coeur d’Alene, featuring variations on the swastika and hackneyed rewrites of Nazi propaganda in an American idiom. Even for those ignorant or naïve enough to believe that a two-state solution is the way to go, even after no offer, even Olmert’s 99.64 percent compliance with Arafat’s demands, was ever accepted — even those folks knew Hamas was just plain Nazi. Perhaps they read their mission statement; perhaps they knew of the real long-term relationship between Arabs and Nazis during the ’30s and during the war. Perhaps not. Didn’t need to know even that elementary stuff to get that Hamas = terror.
But Hamas and its supporters have honed their game. More importantly, their cause has been taken up by the Woke Empire of decadent academia and its hangers-on, who have found violent rape of women, mutilation of corpses, decapitation of babies, necrophilia, and mass kidnapping as alluring as a new letter to be tacked on to their expanding alphabet of privileged identities. Who knew that rape would now be in fashion again? Someone somewhere must be playing an original cast album of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, as the namesake of sadism coaxes the inmates of the insane asylum to sing: “And what’s the point of a revolution without general copulation?” Or is it Lavrentiy Beria in The Death of Stalin, enjoying the bodies of the women hauled in for interrogation before shooting them? How cool! An ultimate intersectional jamboree that includes a designated victim ethnicity joined up with boundary-obliterating sexuality. Let’s stop the persecution of people who break women’s pelvises while raping them! Let’s make sure to appoint one to the next SCOTUS vacant seat.
After almost two months of the increasing volume and frequency and outrageousness of the lies, echoed carefully by so many in the media, and with the shock of seeing the emboldened closet haters all over the world squeezing out from under their stones and acting out their imagination of what it must be like to be brave — one begins to wonder how far and how deep the rot has spread.
That in itself is a morose and debilitating thought to allow space in my head, which I choose not to do. Discipline and duty call. Yet the heart wants so much to be gladdened.
Some gladness came this week in the form of an article on the war in Gaza by Douglas Murray.
Reading or listening to Murray restores my faith in the redemptive power of culture. His language is a joy to listen to or read. His intense humanism is deeply spiritual and feels akin to that of the great religious humanists at the dawn of the Renaissance, though he is free to work through his skepticism in ways they never could.
Murray has been offering a column every week in the Free Press, sharing the poetry that he has learned by heart for its indispensable insight into life. But this week, he had another sort of FP. He has been in Israel and gone with the Israel Defense Forces into Gaza, observing interacting and reporting, and his column in the Free Press was his distillation of that experience.
Here is a crucial paragraph from that article:
The jihadists say they will win because they love death more than we love life. I think they are wrong. Israel will win precisely because they—we—love life. The Jews are ordered by God to “choose life” and even in the face of death, they do. The enemy can’t stop the great surge for life that comes up everywhere here in Israel, even in these days. The units I visit have unity and morale of a kind you would barely think possible. Because everybody now knows what the alternative to war is. The alternative is constant massacre.
Murray goes to the key issue: Hamas is a nihilistic cult of death that rationalizes its actions in the language of Islam. It holds itself to no standard; “by all means necessary” includes exactly what the pure horror of the videos they themselves took shows. And they count on the weakness of those who love life to not have the courage to see what is real, to drug themselves with lies Hamas offers them so that they don’t have to confront the horror.
But what they don’t understand — what tyrants throughout history never understand — is that eventually, the lies wear thin, and then suddenly people are gripped by transformative clarity. Then, they wield a terrible swift sword, and their courage destroys the fortress of lies the tyrannical cowards had relied upon to protect them.
When Hitler had Chamberlain and all the West transfixed with his lies, fear lay heavy over Britain. But when the war began, the heaviness lost its grip. Piers Brendon wrote, quoting from The Memoirs of General Lord Ismay:
The three years prior to the outbreak of hostilities were more difficult and anxious than the three disastrous years that followed. This was because, once the war began, “we lived in a world of reality. There were concrete problems to deal with. But in the years before, we lived in a world of imagination … trying to pierce the veil of the future.”
Israel’s resolve in the wake of Oct. 7 is as Britain’s finally declaring war on Hitler. A nation that was in the throes of serious political difference has come together dramatically in severe clarity about what must be done. There is the fullest agreement on left and right that Hamas must be obliterated, for, as Murray writes, “the alternative is constant massacre.”
As in World War II, that kind of resolve comes more slowly when you are not suffering the attacks directly. But Hamas’ enthusiasts are helping the cause. About 300,000 supporters of Israel rallied in D.C. in complete peace and order. But it’s hard to find a Hamas demonstration that does not engage in harassment, obstruction, heckling, and, at times, violence. They tried to sabotage the tree lighting in New York City, they destroyed American flags on Veterans Day, forced the Thanksgiving Day Parade to reroute, and closed the Manhattan Bridge. They screamed and demonstrated at Rosalynn Carter’s funeral of all things, reminding one writer of a new version of the ghoulish demonstrations of the Westboro Church that loved to haunt funerals of fallen soldiers.
They are bringing a taste of Hamas right here in America for our delectation — and that is helping to clear up for most Americans their uneasiness and worries. It is wretched fare.
The lies of Hamas have been fully expressed, and they are coming undone. Israel is all in on finishing the job, and the uncertainty in America has peaked and is heading the other direction. America’s radical leftist madness may have now at last run itself aground.
It’s running aground on the hard rock of the most basic value that has served as the foundation on which the West has been built — choosing life. We war because we must, and with that clarity, and with the courage it inspires, we can beat those who war because they worship violence and power.
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Shmuel Klatzkin is a rabbi who previously served as senior editor at the Rohr Jewish Learning Institute. He received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and writes and teaches extensively.
Photo “Gaza Flags with Swastika” by IDF CC2.0.
