When Hamas terrorists crossed over the border with Israel and murdered 1,400 innocent people, they destroyed families and entire communities. They also shattered long-held delusions in the West.

A friend of mine joked that she woke up on October 7 as a liberal and went to bed that evening as a 65-year-old conservative. But it wasn’t really a joke and she wasn’t the only one. What changed?

Quoting Thomas Sowell, who he describes as one of the most brilliant public intellectuals alive today, a sentiment with which I wholeheartedly agree, he discusses the conflicting visions at the root of much of the agony afoot in our world today:

… In 1987, Sowell published A Conflict of Visions. In this now-classic, he offers a simple and powerful explanation of why people disagree about politics. We disagree about politics, Sowell argues, because we disagree about human nature. We see the world through one of two competing visions, each of which tells a radically different story about human nature.

Those with “unconstrained vision” think that humans are malleable and can be perfected. They believe that social ills and evils can be overcome through collective action that encourages humans to behave better. To subscribers of this view, poverty, crime, inequality, and war are not inevitable. Rather, they are puzzles that can be solved. We need only to say the right things, enact the right policies, and spend enough money, and we will suffer these social ills no more. This worldview is the foundation of the progressive mindset.

By contrast, those who see the world through a “constrained vision” lens believe that human nature is a universal constant. No amount of social engineering can change the sober reality of human self-interest, or the fact that human empathy and social resources are necessarily scarce. People who see things this way believe that most political and social problems will never be “solved”; they can only be managed. This approach is the bedrock of the conservative worldview.

Hamas’s barbarism—and the explanations and celebrations throughout the West that followed their orgy of violence—have forced an overnight exodus from the “unconstrained” camp into the “constrained” one.

The Reality of Woke Ideology

Many people woke up on October 7 sympathetic to parts of woke ideology and went to bed that evening questioning how they had signed on to a worldview that had nothing to say about the mass rape and murder of innocent people by terrorists.

What has happened to the moral structure on which this, the greatest Nation ever created by the mind of man, was built when so many of our young people, ill-served by the “education” system (euphemism for indoctrination camp) which taught them to hate their own country, can chant in the streets that Israel is guilty of having 1,400 of its own citizens slaughtered?

We woke up on October 8 to the clamor of street protests in cities across the West condemning Israel even before any major Israeli response to the attacks. We watched celebratory crowds brandish swastikas and chant “gas the Jews” at events purporting to be about the loss of Palestinian lives. We saw Black Lives Matter chapters lionize terrorists.

In London, where I live, we watched the mayor deliver glib assurances that “London’s diversity is our greatest strength” in the midst of a wave of antisemitic attacks, and as Jewish schools were forced to close because of safety concerns.

Across the West, we noticed that our representatives refused to condemn Hamas’s kidnappings, and that the legacy media was all too eager to swallow and regurgitate Hamas propaganda.

Prior to the October 7 massacre, many students, alumni, and donors with the “unconstrained vision” trusted that the university—for all its many problems—remained the West’s best environment for civil discourse.

But then they watched university presidents who were quick to issue statements condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the killing of George Floyd fall silent, or offer the most slippery, equivocal statements carefully crafted to avoid offending anti-Israel groups. They watched an Israeli at Columbia get beaten with a stick, and heard reports about the physical intimidation of students on campuses across the country. They read about dozens of student organizations at Harvard signing a letter holding Israel “entirely responsible” for the massacre of Israelis.

Hamas Rapes, Tortures, Beheads Infants-Biden Gives Them $100,000,000

Another article summed it up in its title, There Are No Innocent Gazans:

Do not be blinded by rage, Biden warned the Israelis.

They must do no harm to those “innocent civilians.”

In time of war, what other nation gets conditions like this? Only Israel…and in all our US wars, millions of civilians died through collateral damage…because it was them or us.

So it is, nation to nation.

In rules of engagement, there is no prize for runner-up or second best, and the dead get no second chances.

***

Thus, every casualty in Gaza is the responsibility of Hamas and the assorted terrorists who turned lush greenery into garbage and terror cells.

Hamas started this. Israel must finish this with justified Biblical ferocity.

Did I hear this right?

Biden is sending them $100 million.

His heart bleeds for them who did this to us.

No, he says, the money will be going to those innocent civilians…of which there are none.

Einsatzgruppen=Hamas

In the true madness of the huge protests around the world actually celebrating barbarism and savagery, for that is exactly what the so-called “river to the sea” chant is all about, we see clear echoes of the defense the Nazis tried to mount to charges of war crimes and which was emphatically rejected by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal — the Einsatzgruppen defense, or, the Allies did worse than we did when they firebombed Dresden and other German cities.

The magnitude of the evil of the Einsatzgruppen, to the extent that it is possible for our modern minds to grasp it, is best described in a piece at johnkassnews.com entitled From Einsatzgruppen to College Campuses:

In late 1939 when World War II broke out, the Nazis mobilized machine gun units, known as Einsatzgruppen, whose purpose was to kill as many Jews (as well as political opponents) in Eastern Europe and the Western Soviet Union as quickly as possible. The death squads were not formally part of the German Wehrmacht, but the Nazis had no trouble lining up citizen conscripts, who would round up Jews and transport them to isolated areas. The victims were stripped of clothes and valuables before being machinegunned, often in front of friends and families, who were next up to be killed. After being shot, the Jews, including infants and the elderly, collapsed into mass graves they had been forced to dig themselves. The corpses were then machinegunned again to guarantee no survivors before the area was covered over. (SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler once visited a mass grave site during the killings and had to be taken away when he became physically ill after some brain matter splattered his SS boots.)

The Einsatzgruppen may have been responsible for as many as one and a half million murders, nearly one-third of the Jews killed in the  Holocaust.  The Germans, however, were nothing if not efficient. This method of mass killing ultimately required too much time, too many guns, bullets, and too much fuel for transportation as well as taking an emotional toll on the gunmen, who had to be paid high wages and plied with alcohol to motivate them to kill women and children. The Nazis progressed to small stationary gas chambers using piped-in carbon monoxide before graduating to transporting victims on trains to larger gas chambers in concentration camps and employing reliable, quick-acting cyanide gas.

That defense, aslo referred to as the Dresden defense, was spelled out in this excellent discussion by Martin Kramer, historian of the Middle East at Tel Aviv University, appropriately entitled The Nazi Case for Hamas:

[The Dresden defense] figured in the case for the defense in the Einsatzgruppen Trial, conducted by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal from late 1947 to the spring of 1948. The Einsatzgruppen were the paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany, which carried out mass murder by shooting in Nazi-occupied Europe. They destroyed well over a million Jews, and two million people all told. After the war, their surviving senior commanders were put on trial at Nuremberg, charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The chief defendant, SS-Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, had been commander of Einsatzgruppe D, which carried out mass murders in Moldova, southern Ukraine, and the Caucasus. An economist and father of five, he had supervised the killing of 90,000 Jews. Ohlendorf imagined that he had a moral conscience. The killers under his command, he told a U.S. Army prosecutor, were prohibited from using infants for target practice, or smashing their heads against trees.

During trial testimony, the prosecutorpressed Ohlendorf: “You were going out to shoot down defenseless people. Now, didn’t the question of the morality of that enter your mind?” Ohlendorf referred to the Allied bombings of Germany as a context:

I am not in a position to isolate this occurrence from the occurrences of 1943, 1944, and 1945 where with my own hands I took children and women out of the burning asphalt myself, and with my own hands I took big blocks of stone from the stomachs of pregnant women; and with my own eyes I saw 60,000 people die within 24 hours.

A judge immediately pointed out that his own killing spree preceded those bombings. But this would become known as the “Dresden defense,” …

The Judges made short work of this argument in language directly applicable, in my view, to those preaching “proportionality” with regard to this attack:

At Nuremberg, this sort of tu quoque defense (“I shouldn’t be punished because they did it too”) wasn’t admissible. Still, in the verdict of the Einsatzgruppen Trial, the judges chose to refute it. “It was submitted,” the judges wrote, “that the defendants must be exonerated from the charge of killing civilian populations since every Allied nation brought about the death of noncombatants through the instrumentality of bombing.” The judges would have none of it:

A city is bombed for tactical purposes… it inevitably happens that nonmilitary persons are killed. This is an incident, a grave incident to be sure, but an unavoidable corollary of battle action. The civilians are not individualized. The bomb falls, it is aimed at the railroad yards, houses along the tracks are hit and many of their occupants killed. But that is entirely different, both in fact and in law, from an armed force marching up to these same railroad tracks, entering those houses abutting thereon, dragging out the men, women and children and shooting them.

“Proportionality”? Try Telling that to The Israeli Mother Whose Child Was Beheaded.

We are all excruciatingly aware of this argument, so here is just a brief synopsis of its main talking points from an article entitled One-Sided Rules of War at johnkassnews.com:

No one expects Hamas to obey civilization’s standard for conducting warfare. No one even thinks of calling on Hamas to do so.

But it’s a different case with the Jewish state. Israel is getting a lot of, what’s the right word — advice, guidance, cautions, veiled warnings? — whatever the word, Israel is hearing from various corners about its conduct of the war against Hamas.

Make sure to avoid civilian casualties.

Don’t do anything that would be “disproportionate.”

Don’t let “rage” affect your decisions, as President Biden put it in talking about the need to adhere to the rules of civilized warfare.

Delay the ground invasion of Gaza in hopes of getting more hostages out now that four have been released, say some European nations and the U.S. government.

Others, such as the Democrat squad in the U.S. House of Representatives, aka the congressional antisemitic caucus, demand a cease-fire.

***

And what does proportionality actually mean in war?

Hamas fired thousands of unguided missiles into Israel with the obvious intention of killing Israeli civilians. Would it be proportionate for Israel to fire the same number of unguided missiles into Gaza?

Would it be proportionate for Israeli troops to rape Palestinian women? To target babies for murder? Mutilate and burn bodies? Capture civilians as hostages?

That would be doing exactly the same thing as Hamas did. Isn’t that the very definition of a proportional response? Do exactly the same thing and in the same numbers as Hamas did?

Tit for tat, proportionality.

Some of the best discussions I have heard about this absurd “theory of warfare” have come from the brilliant mind of Douglas Murray. I have set out two of them below and hope you find them helpful in working toward an understanding, to the extent that is possible, of what this idiotic argument really means. (In the first video, the discussion on this point is at the first six minutes of the video.)