Hamas, bad ideas, and evil in the name of religion.

In the wake of the worst tradegy to hit the Jewish people since the Holocoust many of us went through some version of disbelief-shock-grief. The collective trauma of our nation’s past showed up again in the flesh. Following the attack there were hasty attempts to compare Hamas to other groups of terror. Newspapers such as The Jerusalem Post and Yedioth Ahronoth suggested that Hamas are a reincarnation of the Nazis. Although this provides a quick and easy way to explain the horrors of October 7th it blinds us to the reality of why this particular group of people continuously acts in barbarious fashion against others and how evil can spread easily. Furthermore only with an understanding of the principles of Hamas and alligned groups will we be able to strike at the root of their ideology.

Where does evil come from? After the Holoucaust many psychologists and sociologist were plagued by the obvious question of how it was possible for an entire nation if not participating in then bystanding to the worst ethno-religious genocide of all time? It’s not as if we are talking about a pre-modern society of people that believed that sacrificing human beings would somehow stop the next famine! This was the modern world after all, and Germany was considred the peak of it in many ways. So unless we are to assume that tens of millions of people woke up one morning and decided they were suddenly OK with a mass extermination we are at a loss of explaining how such an event is possible¹.

Simply, there can be no evil (or very little of it) without bad ideas. There is a famous comedy sketch that I’ve embedded below titled: Are we the baddies? in which an SS officer begins to realize that they may be on the wrong side of history:

The reason this is funny is because no group that commits atrocities views themselves as the “bad” ones, there is always a rationalazation, always an understanding that whatever is being done is for the greater good. After years of being fed the anti-semetic aryanist propaganda of the Nazi party most germans came to actually believe the things Hitler told them about their superiority and the need to eradicate the world of the unpure races, mainly Jews. In fact Nazi propaganda had done such a good job that decades later children that had grown up during Hitler’s reign continued to foster more anti-semetic beliefs than their older countrymen (see here). So when the order for the trains to start rolling off towards Aushwitz was given, the population ripe given the fact that this is what they believed would set Germany straight.

The vast majority of people on earth are not commiting acts of terror or genocide. So what does it require for a group of people to commit such acts. Shockingly just bad ideas. More specifically bad ideas accepted by masses of people. Take any great moral atrocity commited and it is always linked to a horrible framing of the world² that have compelled the atrocity to be viewed in a positive or at least neutral light. There is nothing biologically that makes a member of Hamas less human than you and I. That is what makes events like October 7th so hard to comprehend, to us it seems impossible that a human being would be able to commit such acts of terror and violence on innocents. To Hamas, these acts are not only valued but mandated by a religion that has been riddled with violent fanaticism for centuries. In the case of Hamas and other alligned groups the idea that brings all of their work together is a “holy struggle against the infidels” or Jihad.

The dogma of Jihad or holy war is such that it is able to cast such a powerful spell over groups of people that it would seem to an outsider that we have walked in on a genocidal cult. Convinced to such a degree in the fantasy of eternal paradise in exchange for acts of violence by way of martyrdom, respect for human life becomes completely meaningless. The murder of infidels becomes credit to exchange with god when the perpatrator reaches paradise. There is an audio circulating of a Hamas fighter calling his parents on the day of the attack. Ecstatic to relate home the “credit” he has acquired he shouts “Dad, Im calling you from the phone of a Jew, I just killed her and her husband, with my own hands I killed 10!”. This perverse excitement over the killing of other human beings can only come about if you are steeped in an ideaology that has so strikingly dehumanized the victim and/or effectively explained that there is a greater cause for your actions (in this case Jihad) that not only is your conscience completely free of guilt but you are actively delighting in what you are doing.

Evil in the name of God. Some prominent atheists like to use the problem of evil and specifically the problem of evil in the name of religion as a means of undermining faith in organised religion. As Jews this is something we rarely ever have to confront in our own circles (except for extreme cases)³. We have been not at the giving but the recieving end of almost all of the religious fury over the millenia. We are at a point in history in which the Jewish nation once again posseses military means to deal with exstistential problems. This is inherently good. According to Rambam⁴ we are mandated to deal with those threats in a violent manner and we will do as such.

The battle taking place with Hamas is not only a physical one fought with our soliders. That is the simple part of this war. The meta-problem at hand⁵ is that after the dust has settled Israel will still need to provide a convincing rebuttal to radical Jihadism. One that will not allow the people of Gaza again to be warped into a belief in violent ‘holy war’ as means of entering paradise. One that will not allow absolutes and fundamental readings of scripture to lead us down a bloody path once again. That is the hard part of this war. It is our duty to take the moral and intelectual stand against an ideaology that has perpetrated much despair and bloodshed in recent memory. May we be successful in both parts of this war.

In memory of the 1,200+ קדושים that paid the ultimate sacrifice.

I am thinking of doing either a deep dive into the problem of evil commited in the name of religion or a sketch of why Islam (as apposed to other religions) is uniquely suceptible to becoming radicalized in the modern era. Let me know in the comments.

1. Specifically not getting into metaphysical explanations for the Holocaust.

2. See Communism, Extreme Nationalism, Racism etc.

3. See Boruch Goldstein

4. משנה תורה, הלכות מלכים ומלחמות ו

5. This is without even getting into the geopolitical nightmare that is the Palestinian problem.