The Stupid Simple Way to Defeat Hamas and Jihadism
Hamas declared the most hideous war on Israel and Jewish People, and the world did nothing. Israel can easily deal with Hamas if it is given the freedom to prosecute the war properly.
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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is complex.
It is about land, resources, borders, religion, sovereignty, self-determination, historical narratives, current and historical grievances, personal losses, and meddling foreign countries.
Yet, it is also simple. It is a battle against jihadist evil, and the war continues after 16 months because too many parties are backing evil.
Lest the Left’s intellectual sloths misunderstand me, I am not saying that Jews are good or Palestinians are evil. I am saying that this dispute has moral dimensions and foundations and that too many people are on evil’s side.
Consider this thought experiment: It is what should have happened after the October 7th attacks in 2023 if we lived in a sane world, rather than a Kafkaesque one.
Imagine if after October 7th, the United Nations Security Council voted unequivocally and unanimously to condemn Hamas and its attack on Israel, demanded its immediate withdrawal from Israel, demanded the release of all hostages, and declared that a UN force or coalition would achieve this, by force if necessary, and issued arrest warrants for the Hamas leaders and members involved.
The world could have responded the way it did to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invading Kuwait in 1990, which I must add the Palestinians shamefully supported because they are the wrong side of most issues.
This would have been the moral response given that Gaza was not occupied (there had been no Jews in Gaza since 2005), the Strip was self-governing (Hamas was in power), and Israel was displaying no aggression towards Gaza. These are facts.
Facts do not cease to be facts just because some people yell really loudly (since that is the only way to be heard when they have nothing of meaning or value to say). Or because their parents never listened to them as children.
People who dispute facts are either self-debasingly ignorant or nugatory liars. Journalists who quote such people should be laughed out of the industry — or what is left of it given their suicide missions of recent years. Instead, they are feted, showing the moral crisis’ breadth.
October 8, 2023 was the key moment. All the world’s nations and international institutions needed was the moral clarity to see that crazed-jihadist psychopaths committing Holocaust-reminiscent atrocities against civilians are evil and need to be stopped.
It is a moral equation simple enough for a lobotomized gorilla. Only psychopaths, sociopaths, and people who are so evil (that only biblical descriptions seem apt) could get it wrong. Yet, the world did get this wrong, and in a way that future generations will study forever.
Instead of exerting maximum pressure, including military force as required, against the murderous and deranged aggressor Hamas, much of the world cheered them on and pressured Israel, the victim, not to fight back too hard against a genocidal attack.
This was a moral calamity. Too many humans chose evil, have worked in its service for the past 16 months, and continue to demonstrate considerable support for the vile Hamas — inside and outside the Palestinian Territories.
Hamas declared the most hideous war on Israel and Jewish People, and the world did nothing. Sane people sincerely thought they were going mad.
We are living through what Albert Einstein warned when he noted that, “The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”
While we cannot expect “leaders” from the UN, as well as Western and Arab countries, to have Einstein’s wisdom, we can expect them to know right from wrong, and not to be so ignorant and evil that they are scientific curiosities.
However, to their credit — if one can call it that — world leaders have done what four generations of historians, teachers, sociologists, and journalists have failed to do: explain how the Holocaust and World War II happened. They happened because the 1930s world leaders behaved in the same pig-ignorant ways as today’s morally shallow leaders.
The window to defeat Hamas by fighting for the right side is still open, albeit just ajar. Here is what must happen, though I fear that only half of it will.
The international community must unite and exert unrelenting pressure on Hamas, and its degenerate backers Iran and Qatar, and back Israel to the hilt.
Israel is indubitably right to have resumed military action against Hamas in Gaza and Israel must not let up until every hostage, alive or dead, is released and Hamas is smashed to such a degree that it is hard to find suitable adjectives to describe it.
Israel is vowing more intense attacks if the hostages are not released. Good. That is how to fight a war. It is not a cream pie-throwing exhibition.
Many will see Israel’s renewed military action as controversial. It is not. The real controversy is that it has become controversial to stand up against evil. We have sunk so far into the abyss there is not even a trace of moral flotsam or jetsam.
If my writing is angering you — and your mind is racing with anti-Israel “what about” questions — then I am sorry to tell you that your moral intuitions are broken and you may be a maniac. Maybe some kind of neural software patch will fix it one day, like a Tesla upgrade.
You might be interested to know how they deradicalized Nazi Germany after World War II. Over time, they put all Germans in classrooms for several years and lectured them about how they had been lied to and that everything they were taught was evil and wrong.
Sometimes, recalcitrant Nazis would give a defiant Heil Hitler salute, after which a few U.S. soldiers would beat them up, and send them back to the classroom, sometimes bruised and bleeding with no medical care. These Nazis soon got the message about what kind of actions paid off and what did not.
I am not endorsing this. I mention it only to contrast the seriousness and will to defeat Nazism as an ideology with the do-nothing approach and apologetics that today’s poltroon leaders display in tackling jihadism.
I have often wondered how this de-Nazification worked. Obviously, the aim was to knock some sense into these Nazis — and maybe it works in German — but in English, one can “knock some sense into someone” or “knock the sense out of someone.” What if you kick the sense out of someone you were trying to kick some sense into? Or vice versa? This kind of thing keeps insomniacs such as me up at night.
In short, U.S. President Donald Trump, European allies, and the sane Arab states — such as the United Arab Emirates, which is a better ally to Israel that many Western states — must lay siege to Gaza, impose sea and air blockades, cut all aid, and choke the flow of money, trade, goods, and weapons.
Fortunately, Trump is backing Israel’s attack and approach, correctly blaming Hamas fully for not releasing more hostages to continue the ceasefire, instead of whining like a boy in short pants the way his predecessor, Joe Biden, did and the Europeans still do.
Let us not imagine that Gaza is some impregnable fortress; a 55-day siege brought down Constantinople’s walls in 1453, which had stood for centuries, and had seen off many empires. So, I think the Israelis can deal with a militia that fails the donkey test if they are given the freedom to prosecute the war properly.
The donkey test, while not a classical political science term, is how I identify failed states. If primitive donkeys pull carts for transport, while governments or ruling militia have multi-million-dollar ballistic missiles that can break out of the Earth’s atmosphere, fly through space, and land on their enemy, then it is a failed state. Yemen and Gaza fit the bill.
Further, Israel should take three-to-five percent of Gaza’s land, permanently and as sovereign territory for every day that passes without the hostages being released. This should be done amid great fanfare, so it is clear that attacking Israel and taking Israeli hostages results in permanent land loss.
It is pathetic that this land acquisition approach was not applied from day one, probably because Jerusalem was under too much pressure from the Biden-led West’s appeasement policy.
President Trump’s administration unleashing some serious power at Yemen’s Houthi militia — and threatening several more weeks of it — is long overdue. They are Hamas’ ally and the last major Iran-backed militia still standing.
Israel has been busy fighting a seven-front war, but Western navies have spent the past year showboating around the Red Sea, while the Houthis were firing ever more sophisticated drones, rockets, and missiles at Israel, at merchant ships, and even at warships.
The Houthis can barely maintain control of half of Yemen, so it is demeaning that Western navies have struggled to secure key Red Sea shipping lanes from them. Maybe Britain should summon the ghost of Sir Francis Drake. He seemed like the kind of man for this kind of situation.
Even more annoying is how the legacy media, which had never heard of the Houthis two years ago, are now writing as though they are authorities on the group and as though the deranged terror group is formidable.
They write that the Houthis will be hard to defeat because they are an indigenous movement, buried in deep caves; the West has little intelligence on them; they are somewhat self-funded; they fought the Saudis hard in their eight-year war; blah blah blah.
This is all just meek code pressuring Israel and the U.S. not to act because much of the “Woke” media supports terror, Islamism, and Marxism — and hates Jews. It is certainly not a position with any moral roots.
These same pundits wrote that Israeli troops would get bogged down in Gaza’s tunnels, that Hezbollah would rain down tens of thousands of missiles on Israel, that the Israeli Air Force could not reach Iran, that Iran’s missiles could penetrate Israel’s defenses, and a plethora of other magnificently wrong predictions. If a stock trader made so many bad calls, they would be fired; a baseball umpire lynched.
What nonsense. Give a me a trebuchet and a square bale of large watermelons and I will put the Houthis back in their box, or cave, or whatever squalid hole it is in which they hide.
Start punishing and pressuring the evil guys — like those Nazi punks being deradicalized after World War II — and they will become sincere negotiators quickly. They play negotiation games because the feeble international community lets them.
It is understandable that unearthly scum with jihadist celestial concerns such as Iran and Qatar will help Hamas, but when distinguishing right from wrong is beyond countries such as the UK, France, Canada, Australia, and Spain (to name but a few), the problem’s scale becomes clear.
It is why no one takes these nations seriously anymore, except as cautionary tales of civilizations whose misguided actions contributed to their own demise.
Many Western countries are more comfortable doing nothing — even if it leads to their rapid and advanced decline as we are witnessing — than doing what is right. Even worse, large parts of the West — primarily, but by no means exclusively, on the Left — are outright evil themselves.
Calling people who lobby for the genocide of Jews evil is hardly a stretch; to the moral mind it is self-evidently true. The politicians who support such people, regardless of the grounds they claim, are wicked.
The “Woke” are already whining about Israel’s siege and renewed military action in Gaza, saying that it amounts to collective punishment. Yawn.
These people refuse to acknowledge that Hamas is a nativist Palestinian movement whose Medieval barbarism was popular enough for it to win power and enjoy significant support even now in Gaza and in Judea and Samaria. This is the Gazans’ collective responsibility and of the shamefully timid international community which has backed them. Anyone who helps such evil, no matter how deluded, is complicit.
These anti-Israel protestors, who bleat more than a goat herd in Judea and Samaria, are always silent about Israel’s hostages, the return of which could end hostilities instantly. They are silent because they are antisemites. Identify and treat them as such.
The Europeans and Arabs need to back Israel and the Americans’ ruthless move against Hamas and the Houthis. Only then will we see some change or progress. This is how to defeat Hamas and jihadism. Strength is the language of the Middle East.
I agree with everything you say. Hamas, Iran and its proxies work together against Israel aided by the UN. There is now only one course of action, to purge Hamas and to rid Iran of its bedfellows. Israel must continue on this course!
You can forget about any ethical epiphanies coming out of Europe. The only thing I can imagine that could get them to mitigate their foundational antisemitism is if they're so afraid of Russian conquest that they come to Israel begging for defense technology.