I feel like I am having a nervous breakdown. It is quite possible, given the awesomely stupid ideas with which I must routinely contend. The latest one I have heard of, coming from US President Donald Trump and his courtiers, is to pay Hamas to disarm.
Apparently, Trump's elite team of A-grade minds think that if they give Hamas terrorists a fistful of shekels, jobs, or amnesty, they will lay down their weapons and become good little boys and girls who eat their vegetables and go to bed on time.
This is a retarded idea.
Hamas is a sociopath-filled, mass-murdering, raping, genocidal Islamist organization that wants to murder Jews, destroy Israel, and bring down the West.
But never mind that. It is all about vibes in the White House these days.
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East, assures us that Hamas will demilitarize and surrender their AK-47s “because they have no choice."
Oh really? If they have no choice, then why is there a need to pay them?
Meanwhile-back in reality-Hamas is vowing eternal armed resistance, praising massacre as theology, and insisting that their weapons are not negotiable and that no one had even spoken to them about it.
[Meanwhile - the IDF has revealed a Hamas document which shows that Hamas is acting actively to preserve its power and its civilian and military control under the planned "technocratic government". The IDF's assessment is that the terror organization will succeed in maintaining its grip on the territory if it is not disarmed].
Even the idea of hardened Hamas terrorists standing in line, signing a piece of paper, then voluntarily handing over rifles that symbolize power, control, and divine mission in exchange for a few shekels makes me feel like I am having a bad LSD trip and need to change dealers.
The part that really ignites my sympathetic nervous system is the idea of offering amnesty to members of a group that burned families alive, raped women next to their friends’ bodies, executed civilians point-blank, and kidnapped children and grandparents. The idea is obscene.
This harebrained proposal tells Hamas and future jihadists that if you murder enough people, terrorize enough civilians, and hold and torture enough hostages, the world will eventually show up with a sack of cash and ask what it can do to make you comfortable.
It is an incentive structure for barbarism.
Defenders of this insanity will insist that it is a pragmatic way to disarm Hamas. That argument is as pathetic as a wet paper bag, and I look down on those who hold it.
Hamas is an ideological death cult that defines itself by armed struggle and annihilationist hatred. Disarm Hamas and you have, by definition, destroyed Hamas-which is why Hamas will never voluntarily do it. Weapons are not incidental to Hamas’ identity; they are its theology forged in metal.
The idea that demilitarization can start with Hamas surrendering its heavy weapons, such as rockets, and then work its way down to smaller arms later is farcical. Hamas uses light weapons to suppress dissent and enforce obedience. So any plan that allows Hamas to retain small arms-while pretending they are being “decommissioned" because pieces of paper have been signed-is a recipe for permanent terror and Hamas remaining a political force in Gaza.
One thing that might tempt Hamas to surrender some of its weapons is jobs. Hamas is already promising thousands of its members-including police, security forces, and teachers-that they will have jobs under Gaza’s fantasized new "technocratic government". If so, that is tantamount to Hamas staying in power, which is madness on steroids. Hamas thugs will be the law and Hamas brainwashers will still be in the classroom.
I know you will not believe it, but this is not even the worst of it. That would be Trump’s praising Hamas for “helping" recover the bodies of hostages it kidnapped and murdered.
His comment that “between Israel and Hamas working together, they got them back" had me retching into the nearest pail.
Trump has said and done some wonderful things in his life, but he has also done some unseemly ones. This one is so awful that I lack the vocabulary to describe it adequately. It is like thanking a serial killer for showing police where he buried the missing bodies.
Hamas did not “help." Hamas committed the crime and knew where the bodies were because they put them there. Israel was forced to negotiate with Hamas because they held hostages. To describe such coercion as “working together" is to drain language of meaning and humans of dignity. Regarding this as cooperation speaks to a deep moral disorder.
Almost impossibly, there is an even deeper sickness at work here, beyond any single policy proposal. It is the pathological inability of Western leaders-who, even though they disagree on so much these days-to know the difference between right and wrong. (And knowing right from wrong is something we had felt made Trump different, ed.)
I do know the difference. For example, I know it is wrong of me to want terrible things to befall these people, but nevertheless I do.
Hamas terrorists are moral agents who choose evil and must be stopped, not managed, bribed, or therapized. This is pretty simple stuff to grasp.
Paying Hamas to disarm is not just a marginal error. It speaks to a worldview in which conflicts are symmetrical, violence is contextual, and all problems can be solved with enough money and a sufficiently euphemistic acronym. In this worldview, there are no enemies, only “stakeholders."
Hamas’ bigwigs are eating baklava in their Doha and Istanbul suites, laughing at the pathetic sight of world leaders who are addicted to the illusion-the lie-that a genuine peace deal exists. Hamas cannot believe these old tactics still work, but they surely do, presumably because Western universities have spent decades teaching people how not to think.
Hamas understands-far better than the clown-school dropouts proposing these schemes-that the West has lost confidence in its own moral judgment, and that this is the Islamists’ greatest strategic asset.
There is a clear alternative to this nonsense-defeating Hamas fully in war, which Israel would have achieved by now had the gutless Jew-hating international community allowed it. Hamas must be dismantled, disarmed by force, stripped of power, its leaders removed from the field of history, and its ideology discredited by failure. This is the minimum requirement of justice and deterrence.
The madness is not that Hamas refuses to disarm. That was always the case. It is the delusion that this refusal is no big deal and just a glitch in Trump’s otherwise masterful plan. In truth, it means there is no plan.
Beyond its obvious stupidity, paying Hamas to disarm would be corrosive in that it would eat away at the idea that evil should be confronted rather than coddled. It tells victims that their suffering is negotiable and perpetrators that their violence is a bargaining chip.
As for my nervous breakdown, I think it is fair enough. If this is what passes for leaderhip, then insanity may be the only sane response
Reposted from Moral Clarity: Truths in Politics and Culture