We’ve all heard expressions about “the fog of war” or saying that “the first casualty of war is truth.” Both are accurate. In modern warfare, propaganda is as much a weapon as guns are. However, there are moments in a war that bring startling clarity. For example, we knew who the Bushido Japanese were with the Rape of Nanking and, while there was moral clarity about the Nazis throughout WWII, when footage emerged of the death camps, it became obvious that the Nazis and their supporters were people of transcendent evil. We are getting that clarity about the Middle East as Hamas and its supporters reveal themselves.

Let me say, as I always do, that there are wonderful, honorable, deeply moral people who are Muslims. This man, may he rest in peace, was a saint:

There are others like him. He was not alone.

The question, always, is what values people embrace. Sadly, the dominant value in the Middle East—and the value transplanted to the West via mass immigration from the Middle East—hasn’t changed since Mohamed’s life (circa 570-632 A.D.).

Mohamed was a tribal warlord in a time and place when the rules of war were Stone Age. The notion of the intrinsic value of human life did not exist. Everything revolved around power and conquest.

Image: Mahomet, the Sower of Discord, by William Blake, 1824-1827.

Mohamed explicitly directed his followers to conquer everyone (the worldwide caliphate). The rules of conquest were simple: Kill the fighting men, rape the women and children, take the territory, force conversions at sword point and, for those that remained alive and unconverted, give them second-class status and tax them heavily. For Jews, Mohamed had something special: Because they refused to recognize him as God’s Prophet and their new leader, Mohamed mandated genocide.

Nothing has changed for Muslims who look solely to the Koran for spiritual and moral guidance. These are the people behind Hamas. These are the people in Gaza who elected Hamas. These are the people on the streets and college campuses across the West applauding Hamas. They revel in the death of innocents because that’s what they are taught to do—and I’ve got the receipts.

Let’s start with this tweet from a vet who served in Iraq in 2006:

It’s long, so I’ll summarize: His team was deputized to travel through dangerous territory to transport a little girl to a medical facility after she’d had two fingers chopped off. They learned later that her father had chopped off his daughter’s fingers so that he could get to the U.S. base and gain information for an attack. Iraqveteran8888 concludes:

Point is…never underestimate the lengths your enemy is willing to go to in order to destroy you. Never forget the innocents who are caught in the middle.

Actually, for Islamists, there are no “innocents” as we understand the term. There are only people who benefit Islam, whether by being fighters or useful victims. Back in 2014, when Israel engaged in a small-scale strike against Hamas, even the WaPo had to acknowledge that Hamas depended on human shields to protect its soldiers and weapons:

According to longtime Middle East analyst Matthew Levitt, Hamas has long planted weapons in areas inhabited by vulnerable residents. “It happens in schools,” he wrote in Middle East Quarterly. “Hamas has buried caches of arms and explosives under its own kindergarten playgrounds,” referencing a 2001 State Department report that said a Hamas leader was arrested after “additional explosives in a Gaza kindergarten” were discovered.

For years, Hamas has “planned carefully for a major Israeli invasion,” according to a Washington Institute for Near East Policy report. In addition to an elaborate tunnel system, there was the “integral use of civilians and civilian facilities as cover for its military activity; schools, mosques, hospitals, and civilian housing became weapons storage facilities, Hamas headquarters, and fighting positions … IDF imagery and combat intelligence revealed extensive use of civilian facilities.”

Thus, to those who are unaffected by Western values, children are not precious beings to love. If they are the enemy’s children, they are primary targets because that’s how one instills terror in the enemy. If they are the Islamists’ own children, they are primary defenses because that slows a moral opponent like Israel and shows well in the Western media.

How does this play out? Israel has warned Gaza residents to leave southern Gaza so that it can level the hospitals, playgrounds, mosques, and other buildings that are simply disguised headquarters and storehouses for Hamas. This is what a moral military does. Hamas has responded by telling its citizens to remain in place. Their dead bodies are good weapons in the propaganda war.

Instilling incomprehensible pain in civilian populations appears in other guises, too/ You’ve already heard about the family that learned about a woman’s murder when Hamas used her phone to record themselves killing her and then posted it on the woman’s social media account. For another family, the Hamas sadists simply sent a snuff video directly to the family as a text using the victim’s phone.

In the Koran, sex slavery is really important. Because Islam hides women, Muslim men have limited access to them. Rape is a great option. For another thing, Muslims view rape as the ultimate defilement of the enemy, which is why raping babies and children is on the table, too. While Western armies do everything they can to prevent their troops from raping women, Muslim armies view it as an inducement to enlist in the war.

I’ll leave you with this excellent Twitter thread about the difference between Hamas’s Stone Age war against Israeli civilians (which it wants to fight against you, too), and the rules of modern warfare by which Israel abides: