Those who grew up in normative Western homes will never understand the evil and depravity of Muslim terrorists.
The execution last week of six Israeli hostages, including one American citizen, is a microcosm of the evil that is truly defining of Islamic terror. Those who applaud Hamas on campus and go so far as to wear their headgear or demand, “Intifada Revolution,” for the most part do not comprehend the depths of moral sickness of those whom they so enthusiastically support.
Way back in the 1970s, there used to be NFL advertisements, “You Make the Call!” They would show a short play and then give you a few seconds to decide if a receiver was inbounds or if a hit involved roughing the passer and the like. Then they would come back to give us the actual answer. So let’s try to put ourselves into the tunnel where Hamas terrorists murdered the young Israelis. Israel just found the shaft to that tunnel: it’s in a children’s room with animal paintings on the wall and toys on the floor. The Nazis couldn’t touch these guys for evil.
So the terrorists guarding the Israelis are sitting around. They realize that IDF forces are closing in and would arrive shortly. So what should they do? One option is to run away and leave the captives to themselves. Such has happened on a few occasions, including just a week ago when soldiers stumbled upon a Druze man who had been kidnapped on 10/7. One of the many, many painful stories from this war involved three captives left on their own by their captors and killed by IDF soldiers who mistook them for terrorists. So, one option would have been to save their skins and leave the hostages alive. We’ll assume that they could not take the hostages with them when the army was so close.
Another option available to the terrorists would be to surrender with the Israelis in their possession. They would be taken to prisons in Israel, and to paraphrase what they say in the movies, “The war is over for them”.
With their position about to be overrun and their ability to either stay put or take the hostages to a Hamas area not available, the captives had no further negotiating value. Rather than just leave them to be found by the IDF, the Hamas terrorists made a death video for each of the captives and then executed them by firing on them from multiple directions. One may argue that by doing the above activities, they further divided Israeli society and put pressure on Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu to give in to Hamas’ negotiation demands. That may be true. But in the end, they murdered in cold blood young Israelis who not only experienced the horrors of 10/7 but went through an additional 330 days of suffering and hell. Leaving the hostages alive would not have changed Hamas’ situation on the ground or its position in negotiations. But, these people worship death and as was recorded in detail on and after 10/7, they are sadistic in their joy of murdering other human beings.
In the years after our son and I were wounded in a suicide bombing in downtown Jerusalem in 2002, I used to give talks to visiting groups, mainly from the US. I would ask those present if they hate somebody. Everybody seems to hate someone. Maybe it’s a neighbor whose dog always eats the daffodils or maybe it’s a political leader whose policies one despises. Then I would ask if they were willing to prepare a bomb with screws and nails not to kill that person but somebody loosely associated with him or her—and die in the process. The crowd looked at me like I was crazy. But those who riddled Hersh Goldber-Polin’s body with bullets (after he lost an arm to a grenade on 10/7) never knew him. They could never cite any action that he had taken that had harmed them. But his being a Jew was enough to make it OK in their minds to murder him and his compatriots when they could no longer be held or moved. Remember, they had the option to either release them or surrender with them. Instead, in keeping with the actions of Muslim terrorists throughout the ages, they murdered them in cold blood.
I am glad when my audience says that they could not kill anybody, and that they certainly would never fill a bomb with shrapnel in order to make its destructive power so much greater. Western values and Judeo/Christian upbringings would make such behavior repulsive and beyond the pale. But it is not for many Muslims. The horror stories that came out of southern Israel already from the first day of the attack were enough to make one’s hair stand on end. And nothing has changed. From the released hostages come stories of surgeries without any anesthetic or periods of little to no food. Because we do not think like these people—thank God—we cannot reach the depth of the depravity that they claim that their religion demands of them. And this creates a huge problem.
Western leaders think that everyone thinks like they do. Bill Clinton was the master of horse trading: he figured that if Arafat gave up a bit and the Israelis gave up a bit, then he would have a deal. But he and those before and after him do not understand the way Muslims think. Just as my Western crowds could not understand murdering someone violently so those in Hamas cannot understand leaving a Jew alive. When Bibi Netanyahu spoke of the Philadelphi Corridor, he did so as one who has known the enemy for all of his life. The clowns in the White House briefing room assume that Hamas is a bunch of Europeans and once they get the Rafah crossings back, they will only use them to move food and building materials. They cannot understand that Hamas’ unbending demand to have crossings to Egypt means getting more war material into the Strip so as to kill more Jews.
On the one hand, we should be grateful that we do not understand the evil that is so integral with Islamist and Muslim nationalist terror movements. On the other hand, we need to appreciate that since we do not think like them, we cannot know how far they are willing to go to kill, maim, and destroy. Biden badgering Bibi and the UK stopping some arms shipments to Israel show that Western leaders do not understand people willing to shoot undernourished young men and women rather than just let them go.
As we see in Europe, Islam is incompatible to the West. Those who remain Muslims first and Brits, French and the like a distant second will never integrate. Many of the European countries are lost due to uncontrolled immigration of people who loathe their new home countries. The US should do everything to avoid such a fate.