Promise was that I
Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver;
Ask for this great Deliverer now, and find him
Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves,
Himself in bonds under Philistian yoke;

Milton, Samson Agonistes, 1671

October 7, 2023 was the greatest lapse in Israeli vigilance, resulting in rapacious Hamas killing over 1,400 civilians and taking 240 more as hostages.

Ever vigilant [1]

At the main entrance to the National Archives of the United States is a statue of a titan seated on an inscribed pedestal, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

The inscription is often, wrongly, attributed to Thomas Jefferson. It was an accepted truism in the early 19th century. There are other titans guarding the National Archives – “The past is prologue.” Truisms hard-learned. Orwell warned, “Who controls the past controls the future.”

The titan vigilance guards the national memory. He is not mere attentiveness. He is surrounded by a warrior’s girding; a plumed helm, a shield and sword, Heracles’ lion skin and most importantly, the faces. The faces is carried by the lictor, the consul’s executioner.

The symbology is lost on the ignorant who pass casually and do not comprehend the gravity of the message. The archives are collective memory so that we remember lessons learned, for:

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

 – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905.

And no people forget more swiftly than those who inherit freedom unearned.

Hence a titan of vigilance because we must never forget and always be mindful of past sacrifice; because America was forged in a crucible of blood that paid its nascent independence – and paid definitively in a gushing abattoir from 1861 to 1865.

America more than any other country in history has paid the blood price to secure the liberty of the individual. It was an ethos inculcated: Thus citizen volunteerism well before American entered late to the Great War. And then again in WW2. America became the Primus Lictor of Western values after taking the lion-skin mantel from the British.

Of course there have been wars of expansion and exploitation perpetrated by the West, but nowhere else have the values of liberty been more broadly held and supported. Thus we can never forget and we must face with moral resolution the price of liberty – the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by an outside authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views. Liberty shall not be constrained unless the expression of individual liberty limits the liberty of another.

Quoting Spooner as a justification for military action is ironic – and yet I would argue that his maxim of self-defense is applicable here: we are defending ourselves in a just war against an evil bent on destruction of liberty.

Simply read the Hamas charter – and believe them. They backed their beliefs with action – sacrificing infrastructure upgrades for rockets – sacrificing their people for Allah’s empty promise.

There are any number of pithy and sarcastic observations to be made about the sad false equivalencies to make the plight of the Palestinians somehow a relevant counterpoint to the suffering of Israel. The idiots that trumpet their support for a culture that actively persecutes them. As Christopher Hitchens elucidated, all religions are bad, and Islam is first among evils.

Victor Davis Hanson concisely sums the importance:

___________________________________________

What Were the Hamas Monsters Thinking?

November 27, 2023

We know the multifaceted strategy of the monstrous Hamas operation of October 7.

In precivilizational fashion it wished to kill and mutilate the most vulnerable of all Israeli civilians and thus to shock the world that it was capable of—and proud about— anything, from decapitation to necrophilia. Such animalistic savagery, in the reckoning of Western therapeutic society, was supposedly to be seen as forced upon Hamas murderers by the “occupation.”

The killers felt they would shock the Israelis into concessions given their eagerness to commit the unspeakable. They took captives for tripartite reasons: to barter children and the elderly for their kindred terrorist murderers in Israeli jails; to use captives to force the Israelis to grant cease-fires and pauses in their retaliation; and to bank them as shields to protect Hamas kingpins from retaliation.

Hamas invaded during a holiday in the early hours, in a time of peace, and on the iconic 50th-annivesary of the Yom Kippur surprise Arab attack. Their aim was to prove that  Israeli soil was for the first time porous and 2,000 killers could enter sacred Israeli ground with impunity and kill in one day more Jews civilians than at any day since the Holocaust.

The terrorists shot thousands of rockets into Israel to overwhelm Iron Dome and terrify the entire civilian population.

All these tactics was aimed at long-term strategic goals: stop the Abraham Accords; obey the directives of Hamas’s Iranian terrorist masters as payment for their arms; discredit the radical Palestine Authority and Arab moderate nations as anemic in their opposition to the supposedly shared hated Zionist entity; and prompt an Israeli response that by necessity would involve collateral damage to human shields, and schools, mosques, and hospitals atop subterranean Hamas headquarters.

Yet if we know their despicable methods, aims, and strategies, why did they think the civilized world would support their barbarity or at least excuse it?

One, Hamas assumed anti-Semitism was prevalent throughout the West and was canonical in the Middle East. Palestinian authorities count on the fact that being an enemy of the Jews of Israel wins them empathy of the world and creating their own unique rules of passive-aggressive victimhood.

So Palestinians demand to be the only “refugees” in the world—not Greek Cypriots, Eastern European Germans, and Prussians, Kurds, Armenians, and certainly not a million Jews cleansed from the Arab Middle East.

Israelis are to be “settlers,” not millions of Middle Easterners who surge and settle into the West, form resistance communities, sneer at integration and assimilation, and use Western liberality to protect and project their own illiberality.

Second, Hamas relies on useful Western idiots. It understands its terrorists repel the majority of Americans. But it figures Western and globalist institutions—academia, the media, popular culture—in their wealth, ignorance, and self-importance, alleviate guilt and find resonance by mouthing the shibboleths of the “underdog.”

In particular, Hamas understands that the Palestinian cause has fused with the leftwing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion industry. Thus Hamas becomes the Middle-East counterpart to BLM, aggrieved minorities, and, more preposterously, the trans/gay/feminist movement. Meanwhile, Israelis are recalibrated as the demonized Western “colonialist” white supremacists.

Third, the Islamic expatriate populations of Europe and the U.S. have soared. In the strange logic of the Middle Easterner in the West—on a green card, or a student visa, or either as an illegal alien or a first-generation immigrant—he will envision the magnanimity of Americans and Europeans who offered him refuge from the violence, hatred, tyranny, racism, sexism, terrorism, and violence of his homeland all too often as weakness to be manipulated, not as generosity to be appreciated much less reciprocated.

Middle Eastern expatriates brag of their growing numbers and the political clout that Islam accrues in liberal democracies, without a clue of their hypocrisy of supporting illiberal tyrannies whose violence drove them out to the West in the first place.

So, we watch Middle Easterners in the U.S. trying to ruin iconic events such as crashing “Black Friday” shopping, disrupting the New York Thanksgiving parade, or tearing down American flags on Veterans’ Day.

Only in America would the Iranian terrorist theocracy’s ex-ambassador to the UN, Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, be accorded a professorship at Oberlin or a former top diplomat for the Iranian regime Seyed Hossein Mousavian land a coveted billet at Princeton.

From such perches these expatriates are free to promote pro-Hamas, Iranian, anti-Semitic—and Anti-American—agendas. They consider their hosts not so much tolerant as stupid, in the sense that any American expatriate in Iran who whispered criticism of the theocratic regime would either be hanged or used as a barter hostage. Why would those whose careers were devoted to demonizing and harming the United States from their coveted billets in Iran even wish to move to the Great Satan, while keeping warm relations with their theocratic kingpins in Tehran?

Four, behind all these considerations, is the reality of terrorism and the fear it instills in the West, given the 21^st century history of Middle Easterners slaughtering thousands of Americans and Europeans. In crude terms, Hamas and its terrorist affiliates signal us, “damn Israel or be prepared for another 9/11.”

Five, Hamas is a death cult, an updated terrorist version of the more organized SS—with the qualifier it broadcasts rather than hides its savagery.

Radical Palestinians brag that they love death more than Israel loves life. So they count on Israel giving up three convicted terrorists for one elderly or young captive, on targeting civilians with rockets while Israelis drops leaflets warning of their bombing attacks, on coercing human shields that they assume Israel will avoid, on sanctioning raping, mutilating, and beheading in a way Israel would never conceive of reciprocating in kind, and on and on.

So will all these tactical and strategic methods work? For all the UN, media, and globalist support for Hamas, still perhaps not.

October 7 was a declaration by Hamas that all barbarity imaginable was now fair game. Yet its sheer evil has unleashed the IDF that perhaps not even Joe Biden, hostages, and “world opinion” can permanently stop.

For all the boasts about loving death, it was Hamas who cowardly murdered the unarmed, scampered back to the safety of their tunnels, and used their own kindred Gazans to shield them from death—delivered to them by supposed nerds who love life too much.

Europeans also have had it with unlimited immigration from the Middle East. Restrictionist politicians throughout Europe are ascending as never before, in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Holland, Spain, and Sweden.

They all reflect growing public anger that Europeans are hated by the very people who seek them out and wish to destroy their Enlightenment institutions by manipulating and discrediting them.  The thousands who hit the streets to cheer on October 7 and damn their hosts only confirm a growing global consensus—in the West, Latin America, Asia, and even throughout the Middle East—that admitting migrants from Palestine or Gaza, or their supporters, is a veritable death wish.

Pro-Hamas protestors calling Joe Biden “Genocide Joe” and boasting about the Arab or Muslim vote in Michigan is incoherent. Not only do harassing Thanksgiving shoppers and parades, disrupting iconic American holidays and events, swarming highways and bridges, and preying on Jews alienate Americans. But also taking credit for ensuring Biden’s defeat will only distance the Democratic establishment, such as it is, from its embarrassing, loud, but ultimately relatively impotent Islamic constituency.

Shouting for mass death “From the River to the Sea” does not endear the pro-Hamas crowd to half of their fellow Democrats, much less unabashedly strutting their anti-Semitism. The current overt support for Hamas, in other words, has revealed to the nation the bankruptcy of the entire pro-Hamas/DEI base of the Democratic Party and will do much to ensure a conservative president in 2024.

And that president will likely deport anyone on a green card or student visa promoting Hamas terrorism, or violating U.S. law, while ensuring a travel ban from terrorist supporting regimes in the Middle East. Such measures will win overwhelming public support, despite media and academic outrage.

Strategically, Iran, Hamas, and the Palestinians may seem to have flummoxed Israel into endless concessions by metering out hostages for serial pauses. But again, no Israel government can retain power by allowing the mass murdering Hamas to survive and so it will not.

Despite all the blood-curdling rhetoric of Hezbollah and Iran, neither will attack Israel or U.S. assets in force, given no American president could afford not to retaliate disproportionately. And “disproportionately” would mean rendering Iran’s military and Hezbollah to something akin to the current status of Hamas.

So for now, Hamas and its American-residing apologists are full of themselves and feel they are leveraging and manipulating the West. But such haughtiness may be a delusion. Hamas in the Middle East and its enablers in Europe and America have done more to harm the Palestinian cause and the idea of Middle Eastern immigration to the West than at any time since 9/11.

It is hard to anger Westerners, but continue the death chants, the violent demonstrations, the creepy anti-Semitism, and the proud support for the Hamas bloodwork of October 7, and they will be surprised at the growing anger of otherwise postmodern Europeans and distracted Americans.

Just as Israel realizes that there is no living with Hamas killers, so the West is learning that it can no longer sustain universities that despise the culture that nourishes it or Middle Eastern immigrants, visiting students, and residents that use the gift of freedom and tolerance to promote their abhorrent anti-Semitism, violence, intolerance—and, yes, hatred of their generous hosts.

_______________________________________

For all the cease fire and hostage trading, there is a simple solution to the current conflict that would preserve the lives of innocents: Hamas leadership should surrender unconditionally to the IDF and suffer the consequences.

The belly aching of those calling for a cease fire misunderstand the consequences of aggression. The tragedy that Hamas created for its citizenry and the just retribution that Israel is forced to inflict is the responsibility of Hamas alone. And the gruesome reality of civilian casualties should have been the deterrent – and one that should never be sanitized. War should be horrific, lest it become palatable. Human action needs to have consequences to have meaning. Death should never be accepted and the sacrifice of innocents for nationalist interests is not moral. Star Trek the original series well addressed these issues:

We don’t make war with computers and herd people into suicide stations. We make the real thing.

James T. Kirk – Star Trek, A Taste Of Armageddon, S1 E23

War is a very messy business and aggression remains instinctive, which was my criticism of Pinker – we are not better humans, just better at targeting with cleaner technology. Armed conflicts remain prolific.

Global deaths from conflict since the year 1400

_______________________________________

[1] There are several inconsistencies in this opinion piece and numerous ironical images, which I have no internal qualms about holding.

The fundamental tension between the necessity of a state strong enough to protect individual liberty from hostile forces and the state’s propensity to use war as its greatest instrument of control is intractable. Still, there are clear examples of morally superior governments (using Spooner as a paragon for judging) and thus a justification for just war in defense of liberty.

I use Biblical allusions despite my adamant belief that religions are used to justify every evil act. Yet Scripture remains, at least for now, part of our deep cultural grammar, creating resonances that can be felt even when not as well understood. The title image of Samson carrying away the gates of Gaza (Judges 13:5, 14:4) shows him destroying Philistine dominion, a direct warning to any oppressor of Israel. The opening quote from Milton’s poem which starts, like a Greek epic, in media res, with Samson shorn and eyeless, despondent and imprisoned. Samson is a prisoner within himself – lamenting that he is blind and powerless. Yet the chorus reminds him, and us, that the capacity for deliverance lies within. Samson’s final act is not passive martyrdom but willed judgment: he pulls down the pillars, crushing both himself and his captors, and rises, in Milton’s phrase, with “calm of mind, all passion spent.” This is not an act of martyrdom to glorify Allah, rather a heroic reprisal to achieve the right of self-determination. (The Palestinians, who already have autonomy, might learn that self-determination is more than perpetual grievance.)

Samson being Eyeless in Gaza leads naturally to Aldous Huxley’s novel, whose protagonist struggles to find moral clarity in a corrupt and disoriented world. Huxley diagnoses the spiritual blindness of modernity — the collapse of certainty in the wake of Nietzsche’s death of God — but prescribes pacifism and mysticism as the cure. Published in 1936, on the eve of the Spanish Civil War and Hitler’s rise, the book reflects a generation too weary to summon the resolve that history would soon demand.

Fortunately for me and most Americans, we are not asked to bear arms against tyranny — not yet. But vigilance is still required. The West increasingly undermines itself from within, producing both enemies of liberty and useful idiots who believe that rights are granted by the government abound. Such blindness is our true danger. And unlike Samson, we may find that no pillars are left to pull down when we finally open our eyes.