So You Want to Be a Stealth Hamas Apologist

I realize that it's a particularly awkward time for anyone who shares common interests with Hamas. Part of the awkwardness is due to the fact that, even after a multi-generational effort to quash and unwind the effects of Judeo-Christian ethical influence in the Western world, the West is still haunted by ancient memories of its Judeo-Christian roots.

Things like, I don't know, chopping off the heads of babies, sodomizing vulnerable women, and burning innocent families to death. Surprisingly, these things are still frowned upon in large parts of the West, and more than a little bit. So it might be wise for a budding Hamas apologist to take a stealthy approach to helping Hamas. Also, for the next few weeks at least, you might want to avoid being too explicit about the secret delight you take whenever someone sticks it to "the Jews."

Still, if you really want to do your part to dampen any moral clarity that might excite emergent sympathy for "the Jews," there are several activities you can engage in that will allow you to support the cause of barbarians while continuing to maintain plausible deniability for yourself. The techniques I'm about to describe will give you a real frisson of having lived out your anti-Semitic fantasies, but still allow you to maintain sufficient deniability that you can maintain your place in polite society. Besides, in a few weeks or at most months, the world will probably go back to basking in the comforts of moral equivalence, and then the awkwardness that currently attends open expressions of anti-Semitism will likely subside.

The best approach to supporting Hamas without risking too much of your social standing is a system I call "The Three D's: Dilute, Deflect, and Divert."

1. Dilute: Right now, the heat is on because Hamas is, yet again, up to its neck in the blood of innocents. Beheaded children have a way of cutting through the fog of moral equivalency and crystallizing the perspective of observers. You need to do what you can to dilute that clarity before it takes root. One way to do that is to suggest that the Jews do this kind of thing, too. You don't have to offer real evidence. And it's really important that you make bold claims with little corroboration, and especially avoid letting your interlocutor start to ask questions or make distinctions between, say, the intentional targeting of children and using children as shields during war. By no means should you let them call attention to, or ponder, those kinds of distinctions. Better to boldly troll the comment threads and just assert moral equivalence, but without spelling things out too clearly. Take advantage of the fact that people who read bold claims are usually not familiar with the claims you're asserting and will rarely want to undertake a big research task to prove you wrong. So, you can take some comfort in the fact that you can dilute the moral clarity of anyone reading posts critical of Hamas by planting these seeds of moral equivalence. And you can do this with confidence that, most of the time, people won't do the research to prove you wrong.
2. Deflect: Sometimes you'll come across posts where the writer says, "Hey, wait a minute, you mean to tell me that Hamas has been saying for years that they want to murder all the Jews in Israel?" While such a sentiment may not bother you, indeed you may get a thrill just thinking about it, you have to remember that this sounds kind of mean to anyone who doesn't hate "the Jews." So it's important for you to deflect attention away from what is actually in the Hamas charter and start getting people focused on other things. This is an area where you can use "whataboutism" as a strategy. You can say, "Well, what about where in the bible Moses tells the Israelites to drive out the Canaanites from the land?" This is a way to deflect the discussion away from the question of whether Hamas should be trying to kill everyone today, and get people instead talking about ancient events that are completely unrelated to the river of blood unleashed by Hamas over the weekend. If you can deflect attention away from what Hamas is doing, you have done them a real service toward dampening the moral outrage that would otherwise be focused in their direction.
3. Divert: Make sure people think of history in terms of impersonal forces rather than the moral agency of actual human beings. By all means, you should avoid any mention of the moral agency of the Hamas terrorists themselves. Assume in all of your commenting that they are merely swept along by historical forces and are not individually moral agents accountable for, say, refraining from sodomizing young women they encounter in the desert. I know it sounds crazy to anyone who hates Jews as much as you and Hamas do, but if you let people focus too much on whether each of us has transcendent moral obligations regardless of where we find ourselves in the overall flow of history, then people will start to wonder whether Hamas terrorists might actually be moral monsters -- something like human beings who identify as Orcs. That's exactly what you don't want. Better to talk loudly about events from the early 20th century and just assume that child murder is understandable in light of those events. Don't say "understandable" out loud, of course. Just strongly imply it and move on.

If you take these principles and apply them by trolling the comment threads on posts that are critical of Hamas, you can be confident that you are doing your part to show solidarity with the rapists of Gaza. And who wouldn't want to do that?