If you can’t see the moral gulf between Israel and Hamas, you are morally blind

One tactic, just one, will tell you all you need to know about the moral gulf between the Israeli Army and Palestinian Hamas.

The human shield.

The human shield is a standard tactic of Hamas, the militant group that rules the Gaza Strip.

They have long used their own women and children to shield themselves, their rockets, their headquarters, their tunnels.

Hamas uses hospitals and schools to protect men and arsenals from Israeli attack. They know the Israeli Defense Forces are unlikely to bomb a school or hospital filled with children or sick people to get to Hamas' instruments of war.

And if the Israelis do drop their bombs, well, even better. Hamas knows a chorus of western liberals in Europe and North America will rain down condemnation on the IDF and the Israeli prime minister, further weakening Israel on the world stage.

They also know the Arab street and greater Middle East will erupt in frenzy.

Human shield a proven militant tactic over decades

It’s an effective tactic. It works.

So why don’t the Israelis use it?

Therein lies the crux of everything. The answer to all.

Human shields don’t work against Hamas.

A human shield, itself, is only effective if it holds value to aggressors – if it is something the aggressor does not want to destroy. And innocent civilians, human life in general, holds no value to Hamas.

Were the Israelis to use human shields, Hamas would laugh. The tactic would only sate their bloodlust that prompts them to gun down any child, elderly man or woman to wreak havoc on Israeli society.

In short, Hamas wants to slaughter Jews.

The historic parallel to Saturday’s massacre

On Saturday and Sunday, when the war pundits were reaching for their historic parallels, asking if this is a replay of the 1973 Yom Kippur War or the 1967 Six Days war, a more apt parallel was banging like a war drum.

This was history further east and further back in time.

Those Hamas gunmen are the spiritual heirs of the war machine that swarmed across eastern Europe in the early years of World War II – descendants of the Einsatzgruppen, the special action groups that moved with the German Wermacht. Their very special action was to slaughter the Jewish people – mothers and their children, old men with canes. Any Jew who still had a pulse.

Generally, it is beyond the pale to compare modern peoples to the Nazis, but when the parallel is blazingly clear, we should employ it.

All the proof of its appropriateness was strewn across southern Israel on Saturday morning.

Entire families of Jewish people bled to death in their suburban homes. Some 700 Israelis in all were murdered. Two-hundred-and-sixty bodies of mostly young adults were recovered from an outdoor festival. And more than 100 soldiers and civilians have been kidnapped.

Some of the mainstream media apologists were on television this weekend arguing you cannot compare the average Palestinian to Hamas extremists. Those average Palestinians hate Hamas, too.

No doubt there is truth to that. Those work-a-day Palestinians know that the point of this weekend’s invasion is to provoke an Israeli counterattack that kills many of them.

Why were Palestinians across the world emboldened?

But tell me, why was the Palestinian diaspora out en masse this weekend with their tri-color and red triangle, their keffiyehs, cheering on the slaughter of Israeli civilians?

Why are we watching the smiling faces of Palestinian expats in London and Montreal?

Why are Palestinians and their American adorers gathering at the White House and Times Square to denounce Israel?

Why so much festive mood when babies were cut down in the Israeli kibbutzim?

Hamas may seem small and weak, but they are the tools of a powerful state actor. They are the trained seals of the Islamic Republic of Iran. They don’t go flapping into Israel unless the Iranians who support them give the signal.

And Iran, as we all know, is the biggest sponsor of state-sponsored terrorism in the world.

Authoritarian powers grow more belligerent

This is not merely an Israeli problem. There is a moral gulf between the authoritarian powers – Iran, Russia, China and North Korea – and Western nations. The former grow more belligerent by the day.

These totalitarian countries care little for the dignity of the individual or the sanctity of human life. Our western world tends to consider itself too cerebral, too sophisticated to distinguish good from evil or to even acknowledge there is evil.

So, we find ourselves, albeit for different reasons, in the very mood Israelis were in when they went to sleep on Friday night.

Complacent.

If we don’t believe in evil, history is about to ferociously return to remind us that there are no limits to man’s depravity.

The apologists for Hamas will be out in force this week, as they always are when their side lobs missiles and provokes war with Israel.

We should ignore them.

It's time for the United States to wake up

No words, no finely crafted arguments, no examples of American and Israeli perfidy, will justify the murder of children this past Saturday.

Hamas are monsters. And so are the people who sent them through Israel's border fence. The people who sent them are state actors on the cusp of becoming a nuclear power.

In Iran this weekend, an adviser to the nation’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was ebullient. "We congratulate the Palestinian fighters. We will stand by the Palestinian fighters until the liberation of Palestine and Jerusalem."

That phrase, “The liberation of Palestine and Jerusalem,” has a synonym – “A second Holocaust.”

Time to wake up.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist for The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com. 

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Hamas' invasion of Israel shows the depths of their evil