The face of evil

Hamas is no political party. They are a genocidal terrorist organization hiding in plain sight. They care nothing for their own, but only aim at murderous Jihad. Their operatives, with plenty of help from Iran, have been slaughtering and butchering innocent Jews for years.

When my 16-year-old son was murdered in cold blood by one of their operatives in a Jerusalem library, along with seven other innocent young men, the foreign ministry circulated photos from the scene of that massacre. They hoped that such shocking pictures — of still-wet blood pooled on a library floor, of bullet ridden young bodies — might help the world understand that Hamas is but a monstrous, murdering machine.

Did it? For even a few moments until people turned the channel to the next shiny, new thing?

Would a better stratagem have been to tell the world that despite the brave new multi-cultural, post-modern, end-of-history world we’d like to inhabit, we still believe in evil?

Like Poe’s tell-tale heart, it can be heard no matter how deeply we bury it, no matter how fancy we dress, no matter how loud we play the music. And it sometimes just waltzes out in full view. Here dripping with the blood of eight young men, there with the ashes of six-million, now with the screams of women and children kidnapped into the infernal tunnels of Gaza.

There is never an excuse to dismiss the obscene malevolence of these foes. They are evil. Evil incarnate.

They want us dead and dying. Lying in misery among the ruins of our country which we and our people built with much sweat, blood and sacrifice. Can we understand that yet? They don’t want a port, or gas, or electricity. All they want is us dead. For they are wicked beyond Western understanding. Evil as the nightmares of monsters that woke us as children.

I believe that once we understand this, we will understand the task, as difficult as it will be, that lays before us.