I’ve procrastinated to avoid writing about this. I didn’t want to scream and tear my hair and write in all caps so I’ve dragged my feet.
I have a book on the shelf that I have owned for fifty years, and I take it down and read it from time to time to remind myself how little I know of evil. It is titled “I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children's Drawings and Poems from the Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942-1944” The book is beautiful, and probably the saddest book I own. Yet I have read it, again and again over the years, because I feel I owe it to the children who wrote the poems and drew the pictures. The least (and the most) I can do is remember them. From the description of the book on Amazon:
“Fifteen thousand children under the age of fifteen passed through the Terezin Concentration Camp. Fewer than 100 survived. In these poems and pictures drawn by the young inmates, we see the daily misery of these uprooted children, as well as their hopes and fears, their courage and optimism.”
The sadness I feel when I read this book pales when compared to the confusion and rage that consumes me when I think of the evil blood lust of Hamas.
The world does not often see cruelty on the scale Hamas unleashed in Israel on Oct 7th. The accounts of the survivors are horrific, the images unforgettable and haunting. The atrocities are so many, and so terrible, I can’t bring myself to list them. The mind shrinks away and wants nothing more than to put the horror out of sight, to stuff the incident in the drawer marked “Trauma” and never open it again. But like the young artists and poets of Terezin, the victims deserve more of me.
Never Again means exactly that. Never again. Humanity can not tolerate what we saw on the 7th of October, or entertain the thinking of those callous individuals who think the terror somehow justified. Hamas must be destroyed root and branch. Top to bottom and side to side. Not “ended” in the sense of going defunct and driven underground, but rather in the sense of every member, every leader and every tool and every person willing to do what they have done being ended. Crushed. Dead. Wiped away. This is awful to consider, but the alternative, doing nothing, is worse.
On Christmas Eve 1864 William Tecumseh Sherman wrote a letter to his Chief of Staff and stated that the Union was "not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies.” He was defending his “March to the Sea”, that had occurred between November 15 and December 21, which gutted the Confederate supply lines and contributed greatly to their surrender, which came on April 9th of the following year.
By all accounts the campaign was a terrible thing. The marching army foraged for supplies (which means, of course, just taking by force whatever they needed or desired) and were under order to devastate any area in which they met resistance. Because they were taking private property, there was often resistance. They destroyed infrastructure, burning industrial and military targets, mills, houses, farms, and cut a swath through Georgia from Atlanta to Savannah. And, it can be argued, in doing so ended the Civil War, a war in which upwards of 600,000 American lives had already been lost.
There are lessons to be drawn from this. For one, war is really, really bad and all manner of horrible things happen; and for exactly this reason, it is best that wars be short and settled quickly. Fighting back and forth endlessly is a cruel waste of lives. If ending war is the point (and shouldn’t it be, always?) the humane and moral strategy is to win, quickly and decisively. Of this, Sherman famously said, “War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it.”
In the wake of October 7th I heard silly people demanding that Israel respond “proportionately”. What in the world would something like that even look like? Israel wasn’t attacked by unarmed civilians and children. The only “proportional” response to such monstrosity is to kill the monster, for once and all and by any means necessary, to insure that such a monster can never harm anyone else.
This appears to be exactly what Israel is doing.
Here in the USA and in other corners of the world some people have come out in support of Hamas. I don’t know what to make of this, other than to not wish to ever associate with any of these individuals in any manner. One of the great benefits of free speech is that people can and often do self-identify as ignorant, toxic, and cruel and I am of the firm opinion that when people do self-identify as such we should all believe them. When ANTIFA demonstrates how cozy they are with the FA, we would all do well to take them at their word. When people march in support of genocide, we’d do well to note their names and keep track of them in the future less any of them one day attempt to rewrite their own history an achieve positions of power.
It is often said that stupidity should be painful. How much more painful it should be to be monstrous, ignorant, full of hatred, and devoid of empathy. The price for this should be very, very high, in Gaza and here and everywhere. But I am not the arbiter of justice. The best I can do is to refuse to support antisemitism in any way. This means not contributing at all. I will not buy the products of such people, patronize their businesses, or hire them in any capacity. I will not make pleasant conversation or pretend that they are normal.
Because of this I applaud those who refuse to respect the masks and post the identities of these horrible people, and I encourage those steeped in antisemitism to keep speaking, if only to allow me to know who I should avoid.
There is evil in the world. There always has been.
And it should be shunned.
That’s my two cents.
Peace.