They weren’t hunting for Israelis, much less for soldiers; they were hunting for Jews. And the idiots who cheer them on in Australia are every bit as morally culpable.
They weren’t hunting for Israelis, much less for soldiers; they were hunting for Jews. Their instructions were simple: kill as many as you can. Nor were the civilian casualties collateral damage: they were the objective. And maiming babies, butchering children, raping women and defiling corpses wasn’t the work of a handful of sadists; they were a pervasive feature of the operation.
At least the Einsatzgruppen – the Nazi brigades who murdered nearly half a million Jews in a matter of months, forcing their victims to stand naked at the edge of mass graves before shooting them through the head – tried to hide their crimes, showing they had some inkling of breaching morality’s fundamental principles. Hamas’s killers did the opposite: they videoed their atrocities and posted them – to howls of joys that echoed from Gaza to Lakemba – on the internet.
Only one word can describe these people: evil. To use the term may seem as anachronistic as speaking of abomination, uncleanness or iniquity. Even the Oxford English Dictionary tells us “evil” has been “commonly superseded, in familiar speech, by “bad”. But exactly as we know good from bad, so we can differentiate evil from ordinary wickedness – and this was it.
“Radical evil”, thought Immanuel Kant, is ultimately incomprehensible: to explain human action, he argued, is to appeal to good reasons; and there can never be good reasons for murdering babies, mutilating toddlers and disfiguring the dead. However, even if we can’t make that evil intelligible, we can capture its essence: the denial of the victims’ humanity.
Read the article by Henry Ergas in The Australian.