"A baby, an infant, riddled with bullets. Soldiers beheaded. Young people burned alive. I could go on, but it's simply depravity in the worst imaginable way." In Israel, United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken described some of the photographic evidence he'd seen of the Hamas attacks against Israel.
As Blinken put it: "Hamas continues to use civilians as human shields. Something that's not new, something that they've always done, intentionally putting civilians in harm's way to protect themselves ... So that's one of the basic facts that Israel has to deal with."
With a clarity that transcends domestic politics, he said: "And of course, civilians should not be used in any way as the targets of military operations. They are not the target of Israel's operations. We did discuss ways to address the humanitarian needs of people living in Gaza, to protect them from harm while Israel conducts its legitimate security operations to defend itself from terrorism and to try to ensure that this never happens again."
We should all work to recognize and eradicate hate in our lives. Others may celebrate evil or work overtime to justify it -- we've seen it on college campuses, Congress, and, naturally, on social media. But we are all in control of our responses. You don't have to pretend the Israeli government is perfect to understand its need to protect its people -- and acknowledge that hatred of Jews is alive and as sickening as ever in our world today.
Since the attacks began, I've seen on social media the faces of so many who lost their lives -- at a music festival, in their homes, as they were working to save the lives of others as first responders. Death is such an intimate reality, and I'm hesitant to look at the evidence of people's brutalized bodies, though I've seen some of that, too. But we must look at the human faces -- those murdered when they were full of life -- because that was what was stolen from them, and that is our common humanity.
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"(W)e are overcome by the echo of the heart-rending laments of so many. Men, women and children cry out to us from the depths of the horror that they knew. How can we fail to heed their cry? No one can forget or ignore what happened. No one can diminish its scale." Pope John Paul II said this in 2000 at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. His words feel near today. "How could man have such utter contempt for man? Because he had reached the point of contempt for God. Only a godless ideology could plan and carry out the extermination of a whole people."
As with the Nazis, and ISIS more recently, any thought that Hamas has a righteous cause is the perversion of any kind of truth or concept of God. Woe to those who have the luxury to pretend otherwise, especially in the West. It's a delusion that spirals into all sorts of justifications for evil.
"Jews and Christians share an immense spiritual patrimony, flowing from God's self-revelation," Pope John Paul II said. "Our religious teachings and our spiritual experience demand that we overcome evil with good. We remember, but not with any desire for vengeance or as an incentive to hatred. For us, to remember is to pray for peace and justice, and to commit ourselves to their cause. Only a world at peace, with justice for all, can avoid repeating the mistakes and terrible crimes of the past."
"Never again" has happened again. It's not the Holocaust, but it has the same roots. And there is similar brutality and inhumanity. I'd love to see Christian pilgrimage hotels, now empty, becoming temporary homes to those displaced by the inhumanity of Hamas and the necessary work of the Israel Defense Force.
Pray for peace. And pray that we confront the evil of anti-Semitism in our communities and around the world.
(Kathryn Jean Lopez is senior fellow at the National Review Institute, editor-at-large of National Review magazine and author of the new book "A Year With the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Daily Living." She is also chair of Cardinal Dolan's pro-life commission in New York, and is on the board of the University of Mary. She can be contacted at klopez@nationalreview.com.)
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