Douglas Wilson's Letter from Moscow

A Pretty Firm Grip on the Ears

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

July 28, 2014

In a perfect world, I wouldn’t have to preface my remarks with any of these qualifications, but then again, in a perfect world, we wouldn’t have our perennial crisis in the Middle East. And so it would be that I would not have to say anything at all . . . in a perfect world.

But here are the qualifications. Israel is a sinful nation, and they need to hear the message of Christ desperately. They are a Western nation, transplanted by Zionists into a troubled part of the world, said transplanting not commending itself to me as having been a good idea. They share the strengths of the West, as well as all the decadent weaknesses. They are in an extraordinarily challenging situation, largely created by the lords of the earth drawing hubristic lines on the map after the First World War. In short, they have a grizzly bear by the ears. On the bright side, they currently have a pretty firm grip on those ears, but the long term prospects are not rosy.


I say all that as a preface so that I might give as resounding a statement of support for Israel in the current conflict as I possibly can. One of the deadliest traps in analyzing conflicts between nations is arbitrarily to postulate moral equivalence where there is none. There are multiple situations where a “faults on both sides” approach just won’t cut it, and this is one of them. If you want to know the difference we are dealing with, Israel uses its missiles to defend its children, while Hamas uses its children to defend its missiles. That’s all you really need to know about this conflict.

I have gone over this before, but it needs to be said again and again. Terrorism is not to be defined as what the big army accuses the little army of doing. That is way too facile. Hamas targets civilians deliberately, as a matter of cold policy, as a matter of course. Israel goes to extraordinary lengths to prevent civilian casualties. Simply on the basis of what both sides openly commit themselves to, we should be able to take it from there. We should simply condemn the avowed depravity of Hamas, and not allow them to distract anybody by wailing about “the conditions” that drove them to it. The conditions that drive them to these insanities are nothing but the smoking craters left over from the previous round of insanities.

I have been writing recently about the irrational hatreds that envy generates and sustains. No better example of this can be seen than the current conflict between Gaza and Israel.

It is manifest that the inhabitants of Gaza will not be ruled by Israel, and they cannot rule themselves. In response, the West’s regnant nitwits gather themselves up to full height, look pretty solemn, and then reaffirm their commitment to paying the depraved miscreants of Hamas to stay on top. We do this so that Palestinian children may continue to live in the meat grinder at the bottom.

But in the decadent West, what counts is moral posturing. Do you actually want to help the Palestinian kids, or do you want to be seen as wanting to help them? Do you want to help Palestinian kids, or do you want a culturally sanitized context for telling us all what you really think about Jews?

Despite the apparent hopelessness of the whole situation there, there are a number of things we could do that would bring about marked improvements, almost immediately. But unfortunately, all the reforms I would propose would start with a cessation of shelling out millions as pay for continuing the stupidity. And in the current climate, a proposal that we stop paying millions to incentivize suicidal stupidity is, alas, a bridge too far.