By Phyllis Chesler

Hamas is not the only “evil empire” that needs to be eliminated. There is also Iran and Qatar, the money behind both Hamas and Hezbollah.

The first time I said this out loud, at least about Iran, was back in 2004 during a lecture. The foreign policy experts, whose knowledge was far above my pay grade, smiled broadly. And then we all went home.

That was nearly twenty years ago, and still the mullahs remain in power, crushing their own people who, despite trying hard to defeat them, have failed to do so. Iran is a totalitarian Islamist regime and the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism. Like bin Laden, the Shia mullahs especially hate and target infidel Jews, Christians, Bahai; women, homosexuals, and independent thinkers; Westerners, and Sunni Muslims.

They are a leadership filled with hate.

I learned how different the East was from the West when I unexpectedly found myself held captive in Kabul long ago. I lived in a polygamous household and was an eye-witness to Islamic gender and religious apartheid in action. I had never before encountered such woman hatred, and casual, acceptable, cruelty. My appalled reaction to women in burqas, being literally forced to sit at the back of the bus was scorned as some kind of “American hysteria.” My mother-in-law harassed me every day because I refused to convert to Islam; she also tried to kill me. I wrote about this in An American Bride in Kabul.

However, when I returned to America, the land of liberty and libraries, no one—and I mean absolutely no one—neither my college peers, nor professors—were willing to believe what I had to say. Everyone believed that all people are the same i.e. are all heirs to the Western Enlightenment and as such, believe in fairness, equality, human rights, logic, science—and want peace.

Even Nazis? I’d ask. Even Stalin’s or Mao’s communists? Even Hirohito’s Japanese warriors? How about the honor killers of women? It made no difference. They refused to condemn Evil. They prided themselves on their multi-cultural relativism.

And now, here I am, once more, telling presumably anti-racist/anti-colonial Americans and Israeli leftists, feminists, politically correct woke-a-doodles, that Israeli civilians are not to blame for Hamas’s high-tech pogrom/terrorist attack; that nothing justifies their being slaughtered in their beds, raped, kidnapped, tortured, murdered; in fact, that Israel itself is not guilty of the alleged crimes that Jew haters insist justifies what Hamas did.

Those who’ve remained silent for the last four or five days while Israeli civilians were being slaughtered, are now already condemning Israel for fighting back, accusing Israel of war crimes in terms of what will happen to Gazan civilians. My (former) people, the so-called “progressives,” have grown much harder, more set in their paradigmatic thinking. They are very bitter, quite righteous.

My (former) people have welcomed the death of their own imperfect civilization through violent, Islamist barbarism. They are committed to the belief that America and the West are evil and must pay for the crimes of our racist, colonial ancestors in blood. And the first sacrificial blood that must flow is Jewish blood.

And so it has.

Just think how much Jewish blood had to be shed in order for Israel to finally forge a unity government. But, even this amount of blood is not enough to stop blaming Israel. The celebrations of Islamist terrorism continue. The concern for Gazan civilians overrides all else. Such non-thinkers said little about the way in which Gazans have been tyrannized and used as human shields by Hamas.

Walter E. Block and Alan G. Futerman have just published a piece in the Wall Street Journal which bears sharing. Titled “The Moral Duty to Destroy Hamas,” the authors denounce Hamas’s willingness to make their own barbarism public as a way of mobilizing Muslims world-wide.

“(This) screams of a deeply perverse and murderous culture, in love with death and destruction. It is the same culture that teaches toddlers to hate. The same society that pays wages to mass murderers…Hence, the West needs to understand that to defend human life and dignity, it isn’t enough to claim to side with Israel. It needs to (provide) total, unrestrictive support…Hamas will be responsible for any civilian casualties…Israel has a moral right to finish the job and the West has a moral duty to support it.”

Republished at the Jewish Voice