Hamas's Boasting Indicts the West
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The Nazis concealed their crimes. They taunted their victims with the threat that no one would ever discover what had happened to them. The U.S.S.R. pretended there was no Gulag and vehemently denied the terror famine, in which several million peasants were deliberately starved to death during the collectivization of agriculture. Either these dictators knew what they were doing was wrong or, more likely, they were sure that others would think so. In both cases, the outside world was careful not to investigate what was taking place, lest it be forced to act. Lenin supposedly referred to (and clearly considered) those who naively believed his propaganda as “useful idiots.” Some of them weren’t idiots at all but knew they were hiding crimes they didn’t want to advertise.
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Were these Soviet defenders purposely deceiving themselves? The French aphorist François de La Rochefoucauld remarked that “hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.” Those who pretend to be innocent of a crime tacitly affirm that it is one. By concealing the murder of millions, Hitler and Stalin, along with Pol Pot, Mao and others who committed atrocities, paid that tribute. When useful idiots play along, the hypocrisy is double: Perpetrators pretend to be humane, and apologists pretend to believe them.
Oct. 7, 2023, displayed something different. Far from hiding its brutality, Hamas advertised it, filming and broadcasting sadistic cruelty. It touted the torture and execution of Israeli women and children as a great moral accomplishment, using the killing as a recruitment tool.
Recall the enthusiastic tone of that young man who called his parents from the phone of an Israeli woman he had just murdered, imploring his mother and father to open up WhatsApp. “Look how many I killed with my own hands. Your son killed Jews!” he told his father. His parents were overjoyed. “My son, God bless you,“ his father said. “I wish I was with you,” his mother added.
Rather than a coverup, this was a media event.
What explains the difference between Hitler and Stalin, who denied their atrocities, and Hamas? Could it be that Hamas knew that many in its Western audience, unlike in Hitler’s and Stalin’s time, would celebrate its crimes as noble resistance? If so, Hamas’s openness indicts our own culture or, at least, its intellectuals.
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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/hamass-boasting-indicts-the-west-196b2b92?st=1YtnK7&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
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Mr. Morson is a professor of Slavic literature at Northwestern University. Mr. Schapiro is a Northwestern emeritus professor of economics and president emeritus.
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And on the American left in general, HAMAS are the good guys.
