Editorial: Hamas butchered Jewish children. Ald. Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez, others are making fools of themselves.

The movement Black Lives Matter arose and grew following the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and George Floyd, among others. At the time of those deaths, especially the murder of Floyd by police, some insensitive people insisted on directly countering “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter,” a statement that, while factually true, was thoroughly oblivious to the raw pain many Black Americans felt.

But on Tuesday, an account on X (formerly known as Twitter) calling itself Black Lives Matter Chicago tweeted a graphic of a paratrooper with the slogan, “I stand with Palestine.” The image appeared to be a reference to the Hamas militants who parachuted over the barrier separating Israel and the Gaza Strip and then brutally butchered Jewish babies and children.

Some 1,200 Israelis are dead, mostly civilians and many of them killed in their own homes, Yinam Cohen, the consul general of Israel to the Midwest, told us in person Wednesday.

He recounted in more detail what most Americans have seen on the news, at times struggling to maintain his composure as he explained that the specialist Israeli forces whose job is recovering bodies had seen so much death inside Israeli houses that many of them had been unable to continue with their task.

“Oct. 7 was the darkest day in the history of the state of Israel,” Cohen said. “This is not about politics. This is not about a two-state solution. This was about antisemitism.”

Put simply, Cohen was calling for moral clarity. He suggested that Americans view the images and the easily discovered videos. “Not too much,” he said, noting their traumatic impact. “But enough to see what is happening.”

There are geopolitical roots to these events. Obviously. But what we saw on Saturday was inhuman brutality of the kind that we must all stand against. Without equivocation.

We are not beasts. We are sentient human beings.

To their credit, that is precisely what leaders like President Joe Biden have done. Likewise, Gov. J.B. Pritzker has left no room for doubt.

On Tuesday night, Pritzker was careful to make clear that Hamas and the Palestinian people are not synonymous, which is true, before calling Hamas an “Iranian-backed army of murderers” at a Jewish United Fund event held outside North Shore Congregation Israel.

“(The) people of Israel should know that America and Illinois unequivocally stand with them in their battle to end the ongoing Hamas attacks,” Pritzker said.

Precisely.

Let’s contrast that with the statement made by Ald. Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez, 33rd, who, the Chicago Sun-Times reported, told Ald. Debra Silverstein, 50th, that she wanted to work with her on a resolution that provides “a more nuanced understanding” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than one proposed by Silverstein.

What is nuanced about the murdering of infants? What is nuanced about killing children in front of their parents? What is nuanced about targeting a music festival with many teenagers, chasing them down and shooting them in cold blood?

As Cohen pointed out to us, the Hamas killers did not ask their victims their politics before raping them, kidnapping them or shooting them. Many of the people in the targeted kibbutzim who were attacked were highly critical of the Israeli government, he noted.

“They were left-wingers,” he said. “This was about killing Jews.”

“Although I wholeheartedly agree that the attacks from Hamas are brutal and that no one should be subjected to that violence, I also understand that the situation is more nuanced than what this resolution expresses,” Rodriguez-Sanchez, a close ally of Mayor Brandon Johnson, reportedly wrote in response to an email from Silverstein seeking support for her resolution.

When you see the kind of brutality that puts any thoughtful person in mind of the Holocaust, and a writer confines her moral outrage to the conditional, you know she doesn’t understand what just happened and how far it is removed, not just from geopolitical arguments, but from the long-acknowledged boundaries of war itself.

Alderman, you should apologize.

The national Black Lives Matter movement, which taught Americans the importance of empathy for their fellow Americans’ pain, distanced itself from the tweeted image on Wednesday, saying the national group was in no way associated with the account and was “not getting involved” in the Middle East crisis. For its part, BLM Chicago sent out messages saying it was not proud of some of its recent tweets.

In the heat of the racial reckoning America underwent in the face of police-involved killings, Black Lives Matter emphasized the danger of false equivalencies and their capacity to undermine rather than support.

How can anyone involved in this cause not see this applies in this case too? How can they have forgotten their own lessons?

Make no mistake. The events of Saturday must not be subject to anyone’s “although.”

As the liberal writer Isaac Butler succinctly tweeted this week: “I guess I was expecting the pro war crimes faction of the left to be smaller.”

So did we.

And we expected more of Chicago’s City Council, which should listen to this state’s governor, get its collective act together and stand behind what’s true and right here.

Let’s not forget that half the population of the Gaza Strip are children. How can we morally advocate for their future protection if we are celebrating or even excusing what happened on Saturday?

These moments can be hard to understand and contextualize in real time. But history will not forgive these ignorant hedges.

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