America, Hamas and Israel
The world feels like it’s being torn apart. I genuinely feel like the nation I grew up in is vanishing before my very eyes and in its place is this nightmarish dystopia where truth is thrown down in the streets and where good is called evil and evil good. Where people scrutinize free countries, magnifying and denouncing every wrong they’ve ever done while praising terrorists.
I don’t know what to do.
It’s all so surreal.
No one has ever said that America was perfect. No one has ever said that we got everything
in our history right. Slavery was
wrong. Segregation was wrong. We treated the Native Americans very
poorly. All those things are true.
I’ve never met someone who hasn’t acknowledged this with
sadness in his heart.
But at the same time, I love my country. America has gotten a lot of stuff right. And we got it right in a way that no one else
did before us. Other countries have
emulated us and when they have it’s gone well for them.
We got the First Amendment right. The freedom of speech and the freedom of
religion are objectively good things.
Being able to be who you want to be, to think the way you want to, to
talk the way you want to, to worship – or not worship – the way your conscience
tells you is right. It is the best thing
that a government can provide for its people.
We’ve also been so earnest in correcting our mistakes that
once we’ve fixed things they were banished from the western world. Slavery is an example. This horrific approach to society had existed
in the world from its onset. It has been
present in nearly every civilization since the dawn of man. Hammurabi’s Code referred to how to treat
slaves in Babylon¹, slavery existed in the colonies of Genghis Kahn², in
ancient China³ and was imposed on India by Arab conquerors for 500 years⁴. The arenas in Rome were filled with slaves
who were forced to fight to the death as gladiators⁵ and many of the tasks done
in the Ottoman Empire were performed by slaves⁶. In fact, slavery has been a reality of the
Islamic world since its advent and still exists there today⁷. It is likely a true statement that should any
individual trace his bloodline back to Adam that he would find ancestors who
were both slave owners and descendants who were slaves.
And yet slavery is now illegal in the Western World.
It is absolutely important to study and to remember the evil
that was the enslavement of the African people by the European colonial
powers. We study it so that we can see
how pride and greed can so deeply infiltrate a society that it turns a blind
eye to wickedness within it. We study it so see how injustice persists because of
men who know better but are too afraid to speak out, choosing comfort and a
nice life rather than being a witness to truth and righteousness. We study it so that we can deeply despise it
and never allow it again.
And yet we should also remember that America, in the end,
did see it for what it was, did speak out against it and despised it enough to
fight a civil war to end it. No outside
state forced us to change, we repented on our own.
That matters too.
So yes, America walks with a limp. We have a tainted history, but we also have a
glorious one. We spread freedom
throughout the world, pushed back mad-men bent on world domination and
outlasted the tyranny of communism. Many
a heart has leapt to see the stars and stripes being brandished by a flag
carrier as American troops were liberating their lands during the great wars. One thinks of the promise made by General
MacArthur to the people of the Philippines as President Roosevelt ordered him
to take his army away leaving them vulnerable to the will of the Japanese in
World War 2. He gave a speech promising
them “I shall come through and I shall return.”
And he kept his word. His arrival
brought great rejoicing from Philippine patriots who had endured in the hope
that he was an honorable man who served an honorable nation. And they were not disappointed.
The general came back again 17 years later to the
celebrations of 7 million Filipinos who greatly appreciated his courage and
sacrifice for their freedom.
--
But nowadays all people want to talk about is our mistakes,
failures and sins. Imagine being the great-grandson
of someone who had committed a murder.
You yourself haven’t killed anybody, nor did your parents, or even your
grandparents but all people want to talk to you about is something that
happened a long time ago that you also think was really bad. That’s kind of how people treat America now.
But it’s worse than that actually.
Imagine that – along with never letting you forget about
something your great-grandfather did – they would simultaneously praise someone
who is actively killing people right now.
That’s what I feel like when I see people praising Hamas
while cursing America.
--
Hamas is an organization that is bent on using any and every
tactic to murder Israelis. They had this
as a stated goal within their original charter and have given themselves to it
for the past 36 years⁸. In recent times
Israel’s Iron Dome has become famous because it has defended the nation from
enemy rockets but consider why a small country needs such a sophisticated
missile defense system. It’s because
Hamas is constantly blasting rockets at them.
And when they aren’t doing that, they are planting bombs or having
suicide bomber missions or kidnapping hostages or anything else that is
terrible that you could think one group could do to another.
Furthermore Hamas, which is the government of Palestine,
practices Sharia Law, which basically means that life is very easy if you’re a
Muslim and very hard if you are not.
Christians, Jews, Atheists, Feminists, Homosexuals and so on are
significantly pressed against even to the point of being executed for wanting
to live in a way that isn’t Muslim⁹.
On the other hand, Israel is a democracy that is based on
human rights, which offers something like the American First Amendment to its
people. In short, a Muslim can live in
Israel (of which there are now over 2 million who have seen 1000 percentage
growth in the past 76 years¹⁰) and practice Islam but a religious Jew could not
live in Palestine.
The conflict that these two nations are embroiled in is
certainly a sad one. It’s sad mostly
because of the Palestinian people, who are the innocent bystanders that are
caught in the middle of Hamas’ mission to eradicate the Jews and Israel’s
attempt to defend itself by crippling Hamas.
It’s not a traditional war in the sense of armies fighting
battles away from civilian populations. One
is sure that Israel probably wishes that this were the case, but Hamas doesn’t
want to fight that way. This terrorist
organization has as part of its strategy¹¹ the storage of military equipment
and weaponry in civilian buildings (schools, hospitals, churches) and
residential areas for the express purpose of goading Israel into attacking them
– Hamas – and in doing so causing Israel to be seen on the world stage as those
who blow up schools and hospitals.
It also doesn’t help the Palestinians that none of the other
Arab nations have opened the door for refugees.
Egypt in particular has refused to take anyone from Palestine¹². This alone would have prevented thousands of deaths. It is strange to me
that they didn’t do this because we recently saw in the Russian-Ukraine war
that European nations (Poland in particular) opened their doors for Ukrainian
refugees to get them out of war zones¹³.
--
In short, the whole thing is a tragedy. It’s a tragedy that the Jewish people, who
have been more persecuted than any people group in history, are yet again faced
with an enemy who is willing to literally do anything to exterminate them. It’s a tragedy for the Palestinians who don’t
have anyone to look to – their leaders see them as human shields and useful for
making Israel look bad on the world stage and their Arab brothers are willing
to watch them die rather than take them into their countries.
How should we view this situation? What is the right way to approach this? Is there a “right side” to even take?
I honestly don’t know.
The only things I feel confident saying are the things I’m
sure of. Hamas is evil. Sharia Law is oppressive. Democracy is
better. The Jews have been the most
persecuted people in the history of the world and, for some reason that my mind can’t comprehend, even though it hasn’t even been 80 years since the
Holocaust, a lot of people still hate them today.
For that reason alone, love compels me to stand with the
Jewish people against antisemitism. That
I’m sure of. Hatred of Jewish
people, particularly in the United States, is evil and should be resisted with
all our might.
Because I feel this way it causes me to extend support for
the nation of Israel. I believe there needs to be an independent Jewish state in the world. And there can be no such thing as a country that doesn't defend itself, so I believe that Israel has a right - and duty - to protect itself against any and all attacks.
But I don’t feel comfortable going any further than that in
my support for Israel regarding this current conflict because I’m also sure that God loves both Israelis and
Palestinians. And this is where the Pro
Palestinian protestors (at least the reasonable ones who aren’t shouting “gas
the Jews” or brandishing terrorist flags) are saying things that should be
considered.
While I believe that nations have the right to defend
themselves and recognize that a sad reality of war is that civilian lives are
often lost, I also wonder where the line is.
Where is the line that gets crossed when what started out as national
defense morphs into brutal revenge? At
what point does the number of civilian casualties become too much and it become
necessary for Israel’s allies to get them to stop? At the same time how does one honestly
measure that when it seems that Hamas wants the civilian casualties to happen?
Furthermore, how do we discern what’s really happening? It is true that the world is more connected
than it’s ever been before and that we can know things that happen the moment
they occur but at the same time false reports run rampant and multiple times
news organizations have run with reports that made Israel look really bad only
for us to find out later that the claims were not true¹⁴.
But even if Israel isn’t responsible for the bombing of a
particular hospital or church, Palestinian casualties are still piling up.
When is it too much?
--
But the more I think about it the more depressed I
become. Who am I – or who the heck are
we to decide when a death count gets “too high”? All lives are precious. Aren’t the deaths of 10 innocent people just
as important as 10,000?
What does God think about all of this?
Thoughts like this make me start to think that maybe I
should be against war in general but that’s childish. War is a terrible reality of the world that
has to be reckoned with and youthful idealism isn’t the answer.
But what is the answer then?
I don’t know.
The only thing I know is that I want the conflict to
end. I want the hostages returned. I want the destruction of innocent
lives, whether they be Palestinian or Israeli, to stop.
But how does this end when Hamas has devoted itself to the
destruction of Israel?
----------------
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean%E2%80%93Nogai_slave_raids_in_Eastern_Europe
³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_China
⁴ See both https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_India#Slavery_in_Medieval_India
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquests_in_the_Indian_subcontinent
⁵ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome#Gladiators,_entertainers,_and_prostitutes
⁷ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_21st-century_jihadism
⁸ https://thelineoffire.org/article/hamas-never-wanted-peace-with-israel
¹⁰ https://thelineoffire.org/article/it-is-downright-scandalous-to-accuse-israel-of-genocide
¹⁴ See both https://thelineoffire.org/article/the-latest-despicable-anti-israel-lie
and https://thelineoffire.org/article/the-myth-of-israel-bombing-a-hospital-will-live-on-for-decades
¹⁵ https://thelineoffire.org/article/the-myth-of-israel-bombing-a-hospital-will-live-on-for-decades
Comments
Post a Comment