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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of Moral Clarity.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
It is not true that you cannot beat an idea.
History is a body farm of defeated ideologies. Nazism and Communism are two 20th-century ideologies that were effectively beaten.
Hamas and its vile Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Islamist ideology are no different.
After Israel’s assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh while he was visiting Iran, much international media quoted an unnamed Hamas official as saying:
“Hamas is an idea, Hamas is an ideology. And the killing of the leader will not change Hamas, and will not make Hamas surrender or make any more concessions.”
This claim gets more credit than it deserves. Jihadists do not believe it. They believe they can defeat Judeo-Christian values, Western liberalism, and Zionism — all of which are ideologies.
Maybe this belief is a factor in their success.
At the same time, pedants might be right in the strictest sense. There will always be someone subscribing to any ideology. Outside of the philosophy classroom, however, ideas get defeated when they cease to hold political or cultural sway. There was no shortage of Nazis in Germany after World War Two, but with Germany in ruins, national socialism was dead as a political force.
Ideologies do not exist in the ether. They live in people’s minds, and people can be killed, jailed, re-educated, and dis-incentivized. About 3,000 Hamas fighters in Gaza have surrendered to the IDF. Presented with a clear choice on the battlefield, these fighters chose not to fight and die for their Islamist ideology, but to remain alive.
Likewise, ideologies require resources to spread their bile and carry out attacks. With the mainstream media obsessed with the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, little has been reported on how Israel has been systematically destroying Hamas’ arsenal and, crucially, its weapons-manufacturing capabilities. Hamas has not been defeated, but it is less dangerous than it was. That is progress.
Fears of Hamas returning to power in Gaza are valid, but it is not because ideologies cannot be defeated. It is because Western governments have policies that enable and support Hamas, even as they claim to condemn it. Consider these ten:
1) Giving Money to UNRWA, the Only United Nations Agency for a Specific “Refugee” Group (the Palestinians)
The idea that a UN refugee agency is systemically involved in terrorist attacks ought to have been a scandal of historic proportions. Donors and the international media, however, seem to think it is copacetic.
UNRWA staff were directly involved in the October 7th attacks and the entire organization is a conduit to channel international aid, ostensibly to help Palestinians, to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
It is not a case of just a few rogue individuals either. UNRWA might claim that “only” nine staff were involved in October 7th, but that is a lie. Given that UNRWA allowed Hamas to use its extensive infrastructure to store weapons and establish command centers, the real number is in the thousands.
This is even before factoring in that UNRWA schools teach a syllabus in which antisemitism, Jihadism, and martyrdom are core components. This has ensured a generation of Palestinian children have been radicalized.
Countries that have resumed funding to UNRWA, after suspending it following the October 7th attacks, include Britain, Australia, Japan, Canada, and Italy. Countries that never even suspended funding include Spain, Norway, Belgium, and Ireland.
Every one of these countries is sponsoring terror. Their leaders are moral ghouls with no credibility to call for a ceasefire before Hamas is defeated in Gaza.
2) Pressing Israel for a Ceasefire
Demands for Israel to stop its war against Hamas immediately are effectively a call to keep Hamas in power in Gaza. Given that Hamas fought a vicious war against the equally despicable Palestinian Authority to get control of Gaza, it is fantasy to think anything other than war will remove them.
A ceasefire would allow Hamas to re-group and re-arm and ensure the conflict continues in perpetuity.
3) Calls for Peace Negotiations
Peace talks require willing parties. Hamas might be willing to negotiate a ceasefire to save its own rotten skin, but it will never agree to any peace that requires recognizing Israel, the Jewish state.
Calls for such negotiations legitimize Hamas as a force in Palestinian politics. Quite why many Western powers think this is a deep mystery.
There should be no peace talks, or even prospects of them, until Hamas is removed.
4) Allowing Pro-Hamas Protests in the Name of ‘Free Speech’
The way Western countries allowed anti-Israel, pro-Hamas demonstrators to take over their cities and university campuses and spew hatred has been obscene.
Do not fall for the “free speech” argument. Allowing supporters of proscribed terror organizations to rally is stupid. It has made Jews in Western countries vulnerable and given Hamas legitimacy it does not deserve. Worst of all, it has normalized the group’s calls for genocide against Jews and the destruction of Israel.
This weak approach has exposed the West’s soft and obese underbelly, emboldening Hamas by displaying how much progress they have made in undermining the West from within.
5) Appeasement of Iran
The appeasement of Iran, Hamas’ primary backer, has been a foreign policy debacle for the ages. Former U.S. President Barack Obama allowed Iran to access billions of dollars in oil revenue for the most minor concessions on its nuclear program, a policy that current U.S. President Joe Biden blindly followed.
The result has been the Islamic Republic is now perilously close to having nuclear weapons and its proxies — Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and various unsavory militias in Iraq and Syria — are attacking Israel from all directions. They are even firing at U.S. bases in Iraq and U.S. warships in the Red Sea.
Messing with the U.S. Navy used to be a very bad idea. As far as deterrence failures go, this is impressive.
6) Continued Aid
The West has sent more than $4.5 billion to Gaza since Israel unilaterally pulled out in 2005, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That is more on a per capita basis than the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War Two.
Gaza’s GDP per capita is just $3,500, so Hamas rule has not brought about some post-war German-like miracle in the Strip. This is because Hamas stole most of the money — the terror group has turned approximately 1,700 of its operatives into millionaires — and spent it on weapons and lavish lifestyles while their people live in utter poverty.
The West continues to pour in money, knowing that only pennies on the dollar will reach ordinary Palestinians.
With an estimated $20 billion needed to rebuild Gaza after the war, this enormous propping up of an odious Islamist terror group must end. It persists because the West lacks the spine to tackle the problem, or allow Israel to do so.
7) Arms Embargoes on Israel
Imposing arms embargoes on Israel makes it harder for it to defeat Hamas. It is morally and strategically insane that governments, many of which claim to be Israel’s allies, try to deprive Israel of the means to defend itself.
The West lacks the stomach for war, but that is a luxury Israel does not have with well-armed, genocidal neighbors on all sides.
Countries that have imposed an arms embargo or limited the export of some kinds of weapons to Israel include Canada, Netherlands, Japan, and Spain. The U.K. has slowed some shipments, while the U.S. has withheld or slowed at least one weapons shipment.
Talk about a lack of honor.
8) Lack of True Diplomatic Support for Israel
Many countries say Israel has the right to defend itself — but only until its starts defending itself. That is when governments descend into performative outrage about civilian casualties and other criteria that they apply only to the Jewish state.
This logical and moral madness helps Hamas. The more people Hamas uses as human shields, and the more Palestinian suffering they engineer, the more support they get, and the more pressure is put on Israel.
If that is not a perverse incentive, I don’t know what is.
9) No Pressure on Hamas About Human Rights
Human rights are an alien concept in Gaza. Women, religious minorities, and LGBTQ+ people are persecuted as a matter of policy. Of course, it is hard to expect minority groups to have rights when no one in Gaza has any rights.
None of the sanctimonious do-gooder Leftie ne’er-do-wells, or the morally empty governments they elect, have anything to say about this. Meanwhile, claims of human rights abuses against Israel, some real but many made up, take up huge amounts of airtime.
Many Western governments, often ably supported by the putrescent United Nations, support Hamas by legitimizing its gross human rights violations.
10) Acceptance of Hamas’ War Crimes
Israel is the only party to this conflict that is required to abide by the laws of war. Hamas’ targeting of civilians, use of civilians as shields, and embedding military positions in schools and mosques are gross violations of the laws of armed conflict.
This generates little-to-no outrage. Israel has gone to greater lengths than any army in history to abide by the laws, yet gets no credit for this. This double standard does more than embolden Hamas to commit war crimes; it rewards them.
Much of this stems from the West fundamentally not understanding that Hamas — as well as Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the more “moderate” Palestinian Authority for that matter — is not a Palestinian nationalist movement, but an Islamist one. This makes them think that Hamas’ interests and the Palestinian people’s interests are aligned, and that helping Hamas helps Palestinians.
It is part of a deeper denial about the fact that Hamas is a Palestinian movement which enjoys widespread support, and that many Palestinians are extremists and not helpless victims under Hamas’ yoke.
The West gets this wrong because the Left has hijacked and corrupted the political discourse. The Left, at its worst when in “Woke” form, has imposed a form of cultural Marxism in which all groups are either “oppressors” or “oppressed.” They have decided — against facts, reason, history, and virtually all evidence — that the Palestinians are “oppressed” and that Israelis are “oppressors.”
The West also gets placed in the “oppressor” category because of its colonial history, and therefore anything the West does is deemed evil and wrong. This is an extremist view but has become mainstream in Left-wing parties in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Germany, Australia, and elsewhere.
Buying into this self-loathing viewpoint has led to the West losing confidence in its own values. When nations can no longer distinguish between right and wrong, they end up supporting the likes of Hamas without even being fully aware of it.
It is a moral calamity.
Brilliant and succinct. Still waiting for just one call for a cease fire to be directed to Hamas rather than to Israel. The obvious fact is that should Hamas release all the hostages, a cease fire would immediately follow. So simple!
In the UK, we have elected the Jew hating FILTH party to government. They retrained their members to disguise their hatred.
Yet the FILTH Foreign Secretary lost no time in renewing funding to Hamas.
The population is too stupid to realise that Labour FILTH are actually Nazis.
The disgusting violence of recent days hasn't been seen in my 72 years and I have to wonder how much the FILTH government has been the root cause.
If people really want the waving through of illegals who get better resources than hard working people, perhaps that could be funded by a voluntary extra tax on their income. This must be sufficient to deal with any problems caused by Hamas supporters let in. Could I suggest 25%?