A world without consequences is all around us.
Israel stopped ships from another “flotilla” that attempted to make its way to Gaza. When commandos from Israel’s Shayetet 13 boarded the vessels, they found no humanitarian aid. When the first group tried this stunt a while ago, they at least had the courtesy of pretending to bring flour and the like to the not-so-starving Gazans. Their aid was taken to the main Israeli port at Ashdod and then transferred by truck to the Palestinian enclave. Why would this round of Ship of Fools make the trip from Turkey when they know that they would be stopped? Because they understood that there are zero consequences for their actions.
Let’s imagine that someone is willing to pay you $100,000 a month to simply stand outside some small business with a sign that says that the owner of said venture is a jerk. The police claim that you are not in violation of any laws, and where you stand prevents the owner from stopping your actions. You thus get rich while knowing that the owner, the police, and anyone else, for that matter, can do nothing. In the world of Jew-hating, there is always money. Whether it be the self-hating Jew George Soros or the Jew-hating Muslim Recep Erdogan, there is always somebody willing to put cash on the barrel head for an anti-Israel program. So let’s imagine ourselves amongst the latest group of pro-Palestinian losers. We set sail with plenty of provisions for ourselves. We talk about how the Israelis would board and beat us. We would fantasize about how we would fight back and maybe take out a couple of Jews. But we know, just as the whole world knows, that the Israelis would do nothing to us. Whether it be out of proper military morality/discipline or fear of another file at the Hague, Israel’s military just does its job and never starts a provocation. Before boarding one vessel, the Israeli Navy took over the radio and blared Britney Spears’ “Oops, I Did It Again.” Not the theme song for bloody hand-to-hand combat.
When people, whether they be your children or murderers, know that there are no consequences for their actions, nobody should be surprised when they return to their bad ways. Does a day go by without some headline to the effect, “X murdered Y in cold blood yesterday. X had 55 prior arrests, including 15 for aggravated battery and using a straw not according to instructions. X was released 10 hours before he beat Y so badly that it took half of Y’s family to identify the body.” Why are people who are so violent, who are so antisocial, being allowed back on the streets to harm again? Someone will get punished, either the bad guys through incarceration or the good guys by living in fear of becoming a crime statistic. Somebody is going to be on the losing end of the equation. Normal societies decide that it’s the bad guys: lock them up, kill the worst, and make it clear that there’s plenty of room at the pokey. That appears to be the approach of President Bukele of El Salvador. I remember when that country was #1 in homicides. Now, it appears to be a paradise, while the bad guys, including some draft picks from the U.S., wear those white outfits as they are run through their paces.
Let’s imagine that you have a shop and you have so much to sell that every morning you put half of your goods out on the sidewalk in front of the store. If one goes to certain neighborhoods here in Jerusalem, he can often find most of what he needs outside and only goes inside to pay. There are two forces that keep people from stealing your stuff. The first is internal: most people have enough moral training to know not to take things that are not theirs. Whether it be based on religious training or some type of innate moral compass, the vast majority of people would not take something that does not belong to them. The second stopper is the copper: if one steals something, there is some finite chance he will get in trouble. He may have to pay a fine or go to jail. He may be humiliated or forced to do some type of embarrassing job as restitution. The problem is that the second block is only 1 percent as good as the moral gate. One can look at crime statistics and realize that large percentages of crimes are never solved. Even when a suspect is found and arrested, there is a byzantine process required to get a conviction. How many videos have you seen in the past year of brazen youths grabbing and stealing goods from stores ranging from Target to high-end jewelry shops? The store owners and their guards are on their heels because the law is not in their favor. Just as an Israeli submarine captain would do more for world peace by firing a torpedo at some of the ships trying to break Israel’s kosher maritime quarantine, a guard at Target who drops two guys with big garbage bags filled with stolen clothes would reduce local shoplifting by 50 percent. But the laws don’t favor consequences; rather, they favor the bad guys.
One can use the same logic on Iran. Their most recent published set of demands would suggest that whoever is still running the country is high on drugs: reparations for war damage, all U.S. troops out of the region, etc. Have they ever looked at the massive damage they have suffered? How many billions have they lost due to a lack of oil shipments from Kharg Island? Iran and its various clients behave the way they do because they know that Israel and the U.S. are hamstrung in their ability to properly respond. Israel should wipe out southern Lebanon, Hezbollah, and anything around it. Israel cannot. So IDF soldiers and officers have been killed by Hezbollah terrorists and their new optical drones because the rules of engagement favor the bad guys. The Iranians figure that since they use everything they’ve got, the other side must have done the same. They don’t understand that the U.S. is partially self-restrained and further restrained by world opinion and global oil prices. But if things get hot again, the Iranians will look back at the first half of this war as being the more gentle era. The Iranian leadership was given every opportunity to accept Donald Trump’s terms, and instead of taking the offers, they have come back with fever-dream demands. They think that Donald Trump is Joe Biden or Barack Obama, who never ever held the Iranians responsible for their murder of American citizens and support for global terror.
None of us likes giving punishment to our children, and when we see a 20-year-old sent up for life for murder, we figure that two lives are lost—that of the deceased and that of the kid who will die in his jail cell. But if a society decides that there are no consequences for actions, then that society can expect the garbage we have today of repeat-criminals back on the street. It can expect illegal immigration without end. It can expect a valueless youth, as they never have to pay for the choices they make. A democracy or republic only works with and for a moral people. Dictators also boast of receiving 99 percent of the vote in their “democratic” elections. Proper values allow the amazing U.S. republic to thrive; no values and thus no consequences mean a dystopian future where the bad guys prevail and the good guys live in fear. It’s time to make the criminals accountable.
