Cowardice is the greatest help for great evil | News, Sports, Jobs

On Saturday evening, the Israeli military made a macabre and gruesome discovery: the beaten bodies of six hostages kidnapped by Hamas, including American citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin. All six hostages had been shot in the head at point-blank range 48 to 72 hours earlier, presumably as Israeli soldiers approached. The Hamas terrorists had murdered the hostages they had held in terror tunnels for over 300 days rather than risk their release.

The discovery plunged all of Israel into mourning. On October 7, Israelis were reminded that the enemy they face is not just violent, but evil through and through. In the months that followed, with the extraordinary advances made by Israeli forces in Gaza despite the protests of the Biden administration, the evils of Hamas were once again relegated to the realm of military conflict. But just thinking of these victims — Goldberg-Polin, 23; Eden Yerushalmi, 24; Ori Danino, 25; Alex Lobanov, 32; Carmel Gat, 40; and Almog Sarusi, 27 — who suffered for nearly a year without sunlight, food or water, and were all shot within hours of their possible freedom, reopened all the wounds of October 7.

It turned out that all of America's diplomatic overtures – overtures that were largely accepted by the supposedly intransigent government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – amounted to nothing. As Netanyahu pointed out, “Anyone who murders hostages doesn’t want a deal.” This was predictable, given that Hamas's primary goal is its own survival – a goal that is in direct conflict with Israel's necessary goal of wiping out Hamas. That is why Hamas has repeatedly stated for months that there would be no hostage release without a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the release of hundreds of convicted terrorists and murderers. Anything less than survival is a loss for Hamas. Dead Palestinians help Hamas achieve its goal of putting pressure on Israel; dead hostages help Hamas achieve its goal of putting pressure on Israel.

And yet the immediate reaction of America and Britain was to press Israel for further concessions. Asked whether Netanyahu had done enough to secure the release of the hostages, President Joe Biden – freshly returned from the beach in Delaware – “NO.” This is obviously political madness. If killing hostages is rewarded with indulgence points, Hamas certainly has an incentive to murder more hostages. But it is, more importantly, moral madness. Allowing a victory to the monsters who are currently holding small children and threatening to shoot them in the head is the epitome of cowardice. Worse still, it is complicity in evil.

The only possible moral framework in which Israel can be held responsible for the monstrosity of Hamas is a relativistic one, in which barbaric evil is attributed to the “Root cause” of the West. There is a reason why so many on the left view America's loss in Vietnam as a victory, or its withdrawal from Afghanistan as a triumph, while ignoring the cruelty of the Viet Cong and the Taliban. In this view, the cruelty of the West's enemies is merely a reaction to the cruelty of the West itself – and the proof of this assumption is the existence of our enemies. If we were kind, generous and tolerant, we would have no enemies, the logic goes – so the presence of our enemies shows how fatally flawed we are.

This perverse philosophy provides ammunition for the world's worst people. To deprive evil actors of their agency is to leave them free to pursue their worst plans, safe in the knowledge that the more brutally they act, the more their cruelty will be forgiven. The West, in this view, can only triumph by surrendering.

This philosophy will destroy the West from within and without. Cowardice is evil's greatest help; in fact, it is its own form of evil, for without it evil could never win. A West that is unable to distinguish between those who kidnap and murder hostages in the pursuit of an Islamist theocracy and those who seek to free those hostages is a West that simply cannot survive.