Walk into any Catholic church and you will see people bowing down to the image of a dead and bloodied Jew. The stained glass surrounding this image will depict other Jews, including his mother, weeping and crying over his naked corpse emitting rays of glory.
Without uttering a word, the message being conveyed is that there is something inherently sanctifying about this suffering, about being a righteous victim who would never lift a finger in self-defense. The greater the horror of the image, the greater the emotion conveyed and the greater the sense of righteous victimhood. Naturally, the political leaders espousing this religious movement never bought into this idea for a second, but they made sure that those living under their thumb did.
Now let us visit the David versus Goliath story, one that took place centuries earlier.
On the surface, the story seems clear: Little David is good and big Goliath is bad. To the shallow mind, this teaches us that we should always support Little/Good when he fights Big/Bad. What goes almost unnoticed is that good becomes inextricably coupled with little while bad becomes inextricably coupled with big. David’s righteousness is conflated with his small size and the small size of his weapon.
The reason for this colossal error is that the modern Western mind is no longer capable of asking qualifying moral questions: What makes someone good or bad? Who should rule the Land? What does a civilization built by David look like versus that which is built by Goliath? Who do I wish to ally with?
Many of us ignore these questions because our societies have forfeited a sense of right versus wrong, holy versus profane, or should versus should not. The shallow secular spirituality of the West has afforded it only the ability to assess a situation based on raw emotional valence, a tool ripe for manipulation.
Much like the village peasant of old who was guilt-tripped by the image of a battered savior and then incited to massacre those allegedly responsible, modern “progressives” only respond to pre-programmed instincts that prey upon noble human qualities, such as compassion. The result is a lynch mob that is perpetually ready to pounce—a mob that dares not examine its own conscience or reflect on what it truly believes is right.
Another symptom of the West’s moral decline is reflected in its obsession with secondary questions that distract us from what Hamas was ready, willing, and able to do when the Gaza seperation fence was left unattended for five hours (a topic for a later discussion). While quickly glossing over how this war started or what it taught us, we can feel the pull of the media and our “progressive friends” steer the conversation towards the most tangential branches of this Tree of Death and away from its essential roots.
How many dead on each side? How many bombs on each side? Were the Israeli babies decapitated or not? Were their heads severed from their murdered bodies before or after they were murdered? Precisely how many Israelis were set on fire?
The whole issue becomes a grotesque football match where only the loser wins.
Would 39 murdered babies be ok but 40 be too far? Can someone describe the precise number of butchered innocent souls that would declare Israelis or Palestinians the “winners” in this sick and twisted game?
German civilian casualties during World War II are estimated in the hundreds of thousands (Gregory Frumkin. Population Changes in Europe Since 1939, Page 74 Geneva 1951).
This does not include populations controlled by fascist allies in neighboring countries or those in Axis countries. Do the “anti-fascists” marching in the street today argue that “restraint” should have been used against the Nazi regime and its auxiliaries as it pillaged the world?
This is not a clever justification for taking innocent life (ḥalila); this is a reality check to us all. It is precisely these facts that make war so devastating. It is precisely these facts that should make us hate war and avoid it at all costs. Uninvolved civilians are always killed, and magical terrorist-seeking bullets and bombs have not yet been developed to the best of my knowledge.
The Western mind has become a stunted shell of the diluted universalized values of ancient Israeli prophets. It has abandoned any sense of mission or deeply held convictions. Therefore, its “side” in this conflict is distilled down to which picture looks the most gruesome or what the final body count happens to be. And we all feel obliged to play their twisted game.
Much like the horror movie Saw in which a serial killer makes his victims mutilate each other and themselves to survive, Hamas and its enablers abroad are forcing Palestinians and Jews into a slasher film with no plot and no end.
Again, only the loser wins.
The West has tried to digest every fringe whisper of an ideology into its institutions. At risk of stating the obvious, it is impossible to hold every value set in equal regard untethered to common principles. If you accept everything, you are really accepting nothing.
Allow me to clarify the confusion. Allow me to be a voice crying out in the wilderness. Allow me to state, unambiguously, the truth that lives in the crevices of our souls:
The Jewish people, via the flawed State of Israel, is the only legitimate sovereign power in the Levant capable of bringing justice or peace to the region. We have a moral responsibility to recreate this land according to its initial vision of serving as an Ohr l’Goyim (light unto the nations).
For the sake of all righteous inhabitants of our land, we have a duty to uphold justice, truth, and peace as stated in the vision of the prophet Zekharia.
The days of shirking responsibility, cowing to the pressures of the international community, flirting with murderous entities, and entertaining perverse worldviews must end now.
We, the Jewish people, must liberate our minds, bodies, and souls – both for our own sake and for the sake of HaShem’s world.
