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October 10, 2023

The anti-Enlightenment fury that makes Hamas’s attack against Israel stand out

By Andrea Widburg

War is part of the human condition. For a very long time, though, as part of its civilizing process, the West has had a single overriding rule of warfare: We acknowledge that civilians, including children, will (sadly) be collateral damage in any war. However, we do not deliberately wage war directly against civilians. Non-westernized Muslims, however, operate outside of this rule, fighting wars with Stone Age savagery. That’s why it's no surprise to learn about beheaded babies. I offer the following thoughts and others about the events and commentary following the Hamas massacres.

Beginning with the Enlightenment in the West, a new idea arose: Civilians are not legitimate military targets. Yes, they’ll be caught in the crossfire and suffer from the disease and famine that always follow in war’s wake, but the legitimate targets are your armed opponents. That’s one of the reasons the British painted the Native Americans as “savages.” In war, the Native Americans massacred all civilians (except for those children they kidnapped to prop up their flagging demographics), and the British had forgotten by then that they had once fought that way, too.

By the 20th century, the norm was firmly in place in the West: Civilians are not legitimate military targets. At the start of WWI, the British painted the “Huns” as the worst of all possible enemies by alleging that they were raping Belgian nuns and tossing Belgian babies in the air for the pleasure of catching them on the points of their bayonets.

Through the 20th century, those nations that had never embraced the European Enlightenment (e.g., Japan, China, Cambodia) or that abandoned the Enlightenment (e.g., Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany) engaged in mass civilian slaughter. Whether it was Stalin’s war on the Kulaks in Ukraine, Hitler’s war on the Jews, Gypsies, and other “inferior races,” Mao’s war against his entire population, or Pol Pot’s genocide of “intellectuals,” these leftists were going to remake society, not just by battlefield victories, but by grinding ordinary people into bloody dust.

Image: Ben Shapiro tweet about the massacre of babies.

There’s one other culture that never went through the Enlightenment’s civilizing process, and that is Islam. Islam fights war now exactly as it did during Muhammed’s heyday: Civilians aren’t just legitimate targets; they are desired targets.

There is no emotion more potent than fear, and Muhammed understood that, if you can overwhelm a population through sheer horror, you will probably win. So rape the women, behead the babies, kidnap people, torture people, mutilate corpses, and generally do whatever it takes to win. That’s how you conquer a swath of the world just north and south of the equator, killing hundreds of millions (Christians, Jews, Hindus, etc.) as you go.

So, none of the headlines coming out of Israel about mass rapes, beheaded babies, families slaughtered in their homes, children in chicken cages (which hasn’t seemed to bother AOC), old women massacred at bus stops, and generalized mass murder surprises me. This is what Muslims do; it’s what they’ve always done because it works. Cow a civilian population sufficiently, and you win.

What’s different in 2023 is (a) the scope of the Muslim attack on Israel and (b) the fact that Muslims feel that they have enough wind at their backs that there is virtue to filming this rape and slaughter and (proudly) posting it on social media for Hamas’s legions of fans. After all, as porn star Mia Khalifa tweeted, her problem with the videos was that they weren’t filmed well enough. That Khalifa would be raped and killed within minutes of setting foot in a Sharia-controlled world is irrelevant. This is her view of warfare.  

The only good thing is that the world is seeing what the Jews have long known: Muslims don’t fight fair.

Here are a few other things for you to read and think about:

Almost three days after news of the massacres broke, former two-term U.S. president Bill Clinton finally got around to commenting on the matter. As Ethel C. Fenig reminded me, it was Clinton who brokered the Oslo Accords that bound Israel’s hands and reinvigorated the Palestinians.

My guess is that the delay in posting something was because Bill was waiting to see which way the political wind was blowing. The same is true for Barack Obama, another two-term U.S. president. He, too, waited almost three days before coming out on Israel’s side:

I can’t help feeling that Obama is not being honest there. After all, in a must-read essay, Lee Smith explains that it was Obama who deliberately empowered Iran. Iran, of course, is a country that openly wishes genocide on Israel, still shouts “Death to America,” and helped plan the Hamas attacks, along with providing weapons.

For another essay about America’s (i.e., the modern Democrat party’s) role in all this, I highly recommend Liel Leibovitz’s essay about “America’s Betrayal of Israel.”

During the years leading up to WWII, a common phrase was, “It can’t happen here” (which Sinclair Lewis used in his novel about an American fascist’s rise to power.) Americans believed that the Constitution insulated them from fascism. As we’ve seen, if fascists (and that’s what modern leftists are, for they’re an amalgam of corporatism and statism) take over a nation’s institutions, the Constitution will not help.

Moreover, when it comes to massacres by cultures that do not view civilians as non-combatants, think about our southern border. Wayne Allyn Root has the best of the several analyses I’ve seen about the fact that, since 2009, Democrats, with no pushback from Vichy Republicans, have been using the open border to bring into America millions of military-aged men from China, Muslim countries, and other non-Enlightenment countries. With that kind of army, it can happen here.

UPDATE: I just found this Charlie Kirk tweet:

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