Wouldn’t it be nice if all we had to do was make believe and evil would disappear?

Because we wish it, it must be so.

Go test that in your life. Unless you add patience, fortitude, and much hard work, you’ll find that evil hasn’t budged.

Yet the dream of being rid of evil must remain. For we need not just the patience, bravery, and hard work, but also the ideal of the triumph of good to guide us and the vision of a truly peaceful world to inspire us. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: We Are All for Decolonization)

In a disillusioned and ever more materialist West, the great redemptive shared narrative that began in the Book given to Israel lost its once-powerful hold on the hearts and souls of people. The catastrophe of World War I not only decimated a whole generation; it also left a gaping hole in the soul. 

Into the vacuum of narrative failure poured new narratives, each claiming to bring the salvation that the old story had promised but failed to deliver. The result of these narratives has been hell on earth. Now, cried Mussolini, Fascism will triumph, and so cried Hitler about Nazism, Stalin about Communism, and the Japanese militarists about their own bloody vision.

Each of these groups argued that the way of past civilization was too constrained. Real truth is too big for constraint. Embrace wild violence and you will achieve what you couldn’t otherwise — triumph over the evil that has made your lives so hard. Hate your enemy sufficiently, embrace any means necessary, and evil will be destroyed forever and you will have paradise. 

And so the great totalitarianisms went marching, spreading torture and death, destruction and misery beyond the imaginings of the cruelest fantasist. The Holodomor, the Gulags, the Great Leap Forward, Pol Pot’s killing fields, the Holocaust — each one of them would have been dismissed as too unbelievable to serve as the plot of a work of fiction. But reality is not subject to a plausibility test. There seems to be no lower limit for where evil will take us if we are ruled by disillusionment and resentment. Anger is a cruel master. Left on its own, it will not stop until the one who surrendered to it is destroyed along with all his victims. (READ MORE: Hitler and Hamas)

To the execrable list of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism, we may now add the Islamism that Hamas aspires to lead — a militant political movement claiming loudly to be the only true vision of the Muslim religion. Whereas the earlier totalitarianisms tried to destroy the religions that had claimed peoples’ ultimate loyalties, Islamism seeks to reinterpret its own faith as a Nazism reimagined and retooled. It proposes itself as the only true interpretation of that faith, and is ready to use whatever force is necessary to make that interpretation triumph.

It’s not the West’s history is free of such things. It was not only the Jews who were robbed, expelled, tortured, and killed in the name of a religion of love, but also those who claimed to be of the same creed, but who interpreted it differently — Hussites, Albigensians, followers of the wrong one of the two or three claimants to the papacy, the victims of the Inquisition, the victims of the wars between Protestant and Catholic and one group of Protestant and another that took up the better part of a century.

But the West found a solution, a way out of this trap. The Peace of Westphalia ended that era of war as the way to determine the true faith. The greatest figure associated with forging that peace, Hugo Grotius, was inspired by the model that informed Jewish law for centuries. Religious uniformity was not required in the old Jewish state, says Jewish law tradition. Only adherence to the seven basic laws of order God imparted to all humanity through Noah. Don’t murder, don’t steal, refrain from cruelty against animals, sexual restraint, set up courts of law to govern society — the basics. Non-Jews accepting these laws were welcome in the Land. No need to seek uniformity for the God who embraces the entire universe. Each community is called upon together to work out everything else.

The harsh acid of totalitarian cynicism has done its best to destroy the great accomplishment of Grotius and of the West. It accepts no restraints on its pursuit of power — “by all means necessary” chant the mobs who are thrilled by Hamas and seem not critical in the least of the deliberate infliction of torture and death on families in their own homes, of babies and children, of raping a woman with such ferocity that her pelvis was broken, and of thousands of other iterations of indiscriminate cruelty. They have the supreme religion, Hamas and they are its woke cheerleaders. Anything, anything can be countenanced against its enemies. 

There are still those deep in the power elite in this country, who are not too bothered, and who restrain their cheerleading for professional reasons. They are seeking to skillfully tamp down and smother the sense of utter revulsion that was America’s instant and healthy reaction to the obscene orgy of violence of October 7. They too believe that they can dream this away, that they can tap in to an endless well of hatred for Jews that was falsely restrained by the past culture. 

It has happened before. As Harvard students expressed sentiments for Nazism, as pro-Nazi crowds marched in New York City and filled Madison Square Garden, those who enjoyed access to power or had the public eye tried to minimize the orgiastic barbarism of hatred unleashed. (READ MORE: Hamas Terrorists Are the Real Nazis)

Even as Hitler had begun gassing undesirables, had swallowed up two independent countries, and had invaded a third and began the first stages of the extermination of one-third of the world’s Jews, Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator, took to the airwaves to say, “There is no Genghis Khan nor Xerxes marching against our Western nations,” and that Germany was not so bad.  We should just mind our own business.

The perversion of civilization is everyone’s business. 

Everyone suffers from it.  America knows this now, deeply and instinctively. Our father’s and grandfather’s generations shed their blood to defeat Nazism and eradicate it from the earth. We know in our hearts we cannot to let the new Nazis get a head start. We do not have the luxury to play make believe. The totalitarians are not playing. We know we must meet them with unflinching resolve. We are equal to this task. We demand our leadership be equal to it as well.