If you watch some of the videos captured by the Hamas butchers as they slaughtered and raped in Israel last week, you can't help but see the face of evil. It's not explainable as anything else, no matter how hard the Palestinian apologists try. You can see the same thing, at a lower volume, when you watch doctors talk about mutilating children in the name of gender-affirming care. These days, evil is speaking its mind without a filter. A lot of us don't want to admit it.
The Nazis were real people. They existed. They did real things. So did the Japanese soldiers in Unit 731. They weren't characters in a superhero movie, they were real. So are Hamas. So are the doctors at the gender clinics.
I worked part of a men's retreat weekend on Thursday and Friday and heard another "God loves you" sermon. In light of what had happened in Israel and what is happening in our own children's hospitals and then the protests on campuses supporting both, that sermon was an obscenity. It's taken me a while to figure out what it is that makes them inappropriate and tasteless. I've come to the conclusion that they are childish. Not innocent and naive, but sickeningly infantile and weak in their blindness and dishonesty.
One of the priests who was on the retreat saying Mass has a habit of saying, "It's x o'clock and you are loved" with a simpering smile. I've always felt that to be a little creepy, talking to me like I'm an anxious child. This time it was sickening.
We're at war. Evil is no longer talking in euphemisms. It is livestreaming its rapes. It is shouting and dancing about its abortions. It is marching in the streets chanting, "Gas the Jews!" It is flashing swastikas from its cell phones at Jews in the streets. It is proudly talking about genital mutilation and mastectomies for children.
In this environment, prancing around and saying, "It's 11:30 and you are loved!" is an obscenity. It is a denial of the pain and loss of the innocent. There is no pain, there is no loss, there is just gooey goodness and love all around. There is no need to fight and argue and stand for what is good because there isn't any existential threat around us. Evil is nowhere to be seen, we can all go back to our soft beds and go back to sleep.
Those who pretend evil isn't ascendant and we can love love love our way to success make it harder for those of us who want to stand up against it. I had a conversation over the weekend with a good friend whose highly respected in our community. For him, things are all normal and relaxed. He'd been lulled into a sense of security by everything he was being told.
I have more to say, but it's incoherent right now.
Meanwhile, here's a professor from Cornell, one of our Ivy League universities. You can find his CV here. It's perfectly predictable in its vicious tribalism.
Cornell University Professor Russell Rickford speaking about Hamas terrorist attacks. Shameful @Cornell. pic.twitter.com/xv1dTqGymy
— Sam Aberman (@samaberman) October 15, 2023
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