I’ve noticed on Facebook that, in 2022, the non-conservatives I follow obsessively posted, “I stand with Ukraine.” However, these same people have been remarkably silent since October 7. The single exception is the series of posts from a woke acquaintance who is fanatically pro-Hamas because he claims that Israel is committing genocide against the Gazastanians (a belief he shares with his Jewish wife). When I challenged this claim, I learned that behind a patina of rationality lay only madness. I don’t know how it’s possible to function in the same political and social universe as people like this.

Lonny (not his real name) has used his Facebook page to claim that Israel has no moral right to wage war on the Gazastanians. Thus, while Lonny concedes that (maybe) something bad happened in Israel, he contends that Israel has the right only to engage in defensive conduct to prevent further attacks but that this defensive conduct does not include waging war against the people who conducted the attacks. Because those people are ensconced amongst civilians, he says, they are untouchable.

We’ve heard this before, of course, because it’s standard leftist rhetoric against Israel. Israel’s response to a massacre is “disproportionate.” A war that kills civilians as collateral damage in an attack against a legitimate military target is, by definition, an unjust war, according to the left.

Image: A Gaza store and its customer. YouTube screen grab.

All of these people remind me of Gandhi, who ludicrously claimed that the Jews should have made themselves willing sacrifices to Hitler to prove that Hitler was a really bad man:

Hitler killed five million [sic] Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.....It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany.... As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.

Of course, one could make the exact same claim about the Gazans. Rather than Hamas fighting back, it should simply surrender—and leftists should be calling for it to do so…but they’re not. They know that, if Hamas surrenders, Israel will end the fighting, which points to Israel’s morality rather than her status as a war criminal. They simply don’t want Israel to prevail. Moreover, leftists know that, unlike Israel, Hamas and its supporters around the world are vocal about Israel’s destruction and the concomitant eradication of the Jewish people.

And that gets us to the old leftist bugaboo of projection. If Hamas is calling for the Jews’ extermination, then the leftists must project that call for genocide onto the Jews, and claim that they’re trying to exterminate Gazastanians. And that, of course, is exactly what Lonny did. Israel, he said, is engaged in a genocide against Gaza.

Genocide, of course, has a clear definition: It is the intentional extermination of a people. Hitler, for example, wished to eradicate Jews from the face of the earth and, in pursuit of that goal, slaughtered 6 million of them. This had nothing to do with conducting his war and, in fact, required him to reallocate resources away from the military, diminishing Germany’s ability to wage war.

With the actual definition of genocide in mind, I challenged Lonny with an irrefutable fact:

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (“PCBS”), Population Estimates by District and Governorate, 2023, the population has grown from 1.1 million in 1967 to 14.0 million in 2023. This represents a growth of 12.9 million people for an average annual growth rate of 3.1%.

That kind of extraordinary population growth isn’t what happens when you’re living under the control of or, after 2005, in the shadow of a genocidal enemy.

I would have thought, at this point, that Lonny would slink away, but Lonny is made of sterner stuff. He came back with this response: “The Palestinian population is growing only because they don’t have access to good health care and family planning. And just because a population is growing, that doesn’t mean that it’s not experiencing a planned genocide.”

I can’t even begin to grapple with the logic there, can you? The lack of health care usually means a population shrinks, not grows. And family planning always means abortion. In other words, Lonny thinks the Palestinians should be culling their own herd. Finally, I can’t even imagine a realm in which it’s logical that, even as Palestinians have grown 14-fold in number, they’re still victims of genocide. This redefinition of the term would embarrass Orwell’s Big Brother.

Obviously, Lonny is disconnected from reality, but the problem is that Lonny is not alone. Lonny’s fellow travelers are in academia, on the streets of America’s major cities, in Congress, across Europe, and swarming social media. We live in an age that has fallen so far from the Enlightenment that it may as well be 1023 rather than 2023. And I very much fear that the Lonnies of the world will win through the sheer mass of their mental darkness.

I’ll end, not with my words, but with Harry Truman’s, contained in a letter he wrote to Samuel Cavert, General Secretary for the Federal Council of The Churches of Christ in America, who was upset with Truman’s decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan:

August 11, 1945

My dear Mr. Cavert:

I appreciated very much your telegram of August ninth.

Nobody is more disturbed over the use of Atomic bombs than I am but I was greatly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and their murder of our prisoners of war. The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them.

When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true.

Sincerely yours,

Harry  S. Truman [in autograph]