“This is the price for all who criticize Hamas”

On March 29, Hamas murdered twenty-two-year-old Uday Nassar Saadi al-Rabbay, according to his family. They tortured him and mutilated his body, then threw his body off a tall building.

His crime? He took part in recent protests against the terrorists who rule Gaza.

As a result, according to his mother, “They caught him, tortured him, slashed his arms with knives, stabbed him with screwdrivers. They stabbed him 170 times. His whole body was stabbed and pierced.” A note was pinned to his body: “This is the price for all who criticize Hamas.”

“The most appalling act of racism”

The most detailed Western investigation into the atrocities of October 7 has now been released. The UK’s October 7 Parliamentary Commission Report runs to 318 pages. Chaired by Lord Andrew Roberts, one of Britain’s leading historians, it documents the deaths of 1,182 people in a forty-eight-hour period. The report describes the assault as “a meticulously planned operation designed not only to kill but to terrorize through extreme brutality, looting, and humiliation.”

Some examples in the report:

• A baby was murdered just fourteen hours after it was born.
• A Holocaust survivor was killed at the age of ninety-one.
• Infants were shot in strollers or burned alive.
• Women and girls were gang raped.
• Sexual violence was committed against corpses.
• Terrorists used victims’ phones to send images to their families, booby-trapped corpses with grenades, and dragged bodies through Gaza.

When asked how democracies should respond, Roberts answered: “The first is properly to memorialize the victims. The second . . . is to see this appalling act of barbarism for what it is, which is a complete denial of democracy, a blow struck deliberately against civilization, and . . . the most appalling act of racism.”

(For more on this “appalling act of racism,” please see my friend Reuben Nevo’s firsthand account of growing up where Hamas invaded and the path forward for Israel.)

The immorality of “moral equivalence”

I reference Uday al-Rabbay’s murder and the UK report to counter the “moral equivalence” claims that have tragically dominated much of Western response to October 7. From college campuses to media outlets to halls of government, we continually hear the assertion that “both sides are wrong” and that Israel is as complicit in this tragedy as Hamas.

Some go even further, caricaturing Israel as a “colonialist” whose “oppression” of Gaza forced Hamas to respond as it did and blaming Jews for the massacre of Jews. As Israel continues its efforts to keep Hamas from mounting another such invasion (something the terrorist group repeatedly claims it wants to do), much of the world blames the IDF for all civilian casualties despite the fact that Hamas hides behind Palestinian human shields, mosques, hospitals, and schools.

If Israel’s critics want the Jewish state to defend itself at all, they want it to do so while engaging a highly challenging urban environment in ways that do not harm the very civilians Hamas hides behind and whose subsequent deaths Hamas uses to bolster itself in the court of world opinion.

I do not mean to suggest that Israel is by any means a perfect nation or that the IDF has responded flawlessly to October 7 in Gaza. Like America, they are a nation made of fallen sinners who sometimes fail their values just as we do.

The difference between Israel and Hamas is that the former has values the latter does not.

If Israel laid down its arms

As I have explained repeatedly since Oct. 7, Hamas’ atrocities express their founding charter and commitment to the annihilation of Israel. This is why Israel must not allow Hamas to rearm itself, or it will stage another October 7.

Dennis Prager, a cultural commentator who studied at the Middle East Institute at Columbia University’s School of International Affairs, explains the conflict this way:

Israel wants to exist as a Jewish state and to live in peace. Israel also recognizes the right of Palestinians to have their own state and to live in peace. The problem, however, is that most Palestinians and many other Muslims and Arabs do not recognize the right of the Jewish state of Israel to exist. . . .

Think about these two questions: If, tomorrow, Israel laid down its arms and announced, “We will fight no more,” what would happen? And if the Arab countries around Israel laid down their arms and announced, “We will fight no more,” what would happen?

In the first case, there would be an immediate destruction of the state of Israel and the mass murder of its Jewish population. In the second case, there would be peace the next day.

October 7 made Prager’s point brutally clear.

“We fall down, and we get up”

Let’s close by making the issue of moral relativism personal.

We live in a postmodern culture where such relativism reigns supreme. Many illogically believe it to be absolutely true that there are no absolute truths. Add Critical Theory’s Marxist division of the entire human race into oppressors and oppressed, and you have a recipe for immorality in the name of morality.

This issue is as real for you and me as it is for Hamas’s most virulent supporters. Like you, I am tempted to view uncomfortable truths through the prism of personal preferences, making Jesus my Lord only in those places where his lordship does not demand changes I do not want to make.

Here’s the good news: God will help anyone to be holy who wants his help.

Solomon noted: “The way of the wicked is an abomination to the Lᴏʀᴅ, but he loves him who pursues righteousness” (Proverbs 15:9, my emphasis). Since we are finite and fallen people, the “pursuit” of righteousness is what God seeks.

Our secularized culture measures success by the destination, since its destinations are within human reach. God measures success by the journey, since the destination is not achievable in this life.

Someone once asked a monk living in a mountain monastery high above the village below, “What do you do up there so close to God?” He smiled and replied, “We fall down, and we get up. We fall down, and we get up. We fall down, and we get up.”

Let’s do the same today, to the glory of God.

Quote for the day:

“Because truth is unpopular does not mean that it should not be proclaimed.” —Billy Graham

Our latest website resources:

• Criminal calls 911 after injuring himself during break-in: An April Fools’ Day story and the health of our souls
• A biblical alternative to toxic empathy
• The latest on the Myanmar earthquake and Hamas hostages: An article I did not intend to write and a quote that changed my heart
• Is the new “Snow White” worth seeing? Why the new film is so controversial
• Growing up on the Gaza border: My view on the war in Israel and why there can be no peace until the hostages come home