How to choose a side in the Israel-Hamas war? Take this two-step test

Wars are never pretty. But from the accounts of those who have watched the footage released by Israel on the October 7 attacks by Hamas on its kibbutz — now gingerly seeping into social media with graphic content warnings — are particularly disorienting. They breach the red lines of depravity that even humans most inured to violence are able to take. The body of a baby who seemed to have been baked in an oven, possibly alive. Bloodied corpses lying in a heap in bedrooms, bathrooms, and by the roadside. Hamas terrorists taking turns to rape a woman from behind and finally one of them shooting her in the head during the act. Brutalised, naked young women being transported in open vehicles. Two soldiers without heads. Israeli captives being humiliated and jeered at in Gaza. Men hitting a dead Jewish young man repeatedly on the head with spades. It is a steady stream of images of unconceivable violence. One was reel of nearly 44 minutes of raw footage curated by the Israeli military from hundreds of hours of material collected about the October 7 attacks from Hamas assailants’ body cameras, traffic cams, CCTV, mobile phones and social media accounts of victims, soldiers and medical workers was screened at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles recently. Similar footage was shown at the military base in Tel Aviv to journalists. There were collective gasps and groans; many looking away from the screen in sheer horror. On the other side are Israeli missiles whistling through the night air towards Gaza; the earth-shaking explosions followed by screams of men, women and children; photos of commercial buildings, homes, hospitals and schools pummelled by thousands of tons of explosives into rubble; tens of thousands fleeing to safety with their thin baggage. Can one choose a side in such encompassing human tragedy in which cornerstones of morality lie in smithereens in five hundred shades of grey? Yes, perhaps. Not by the doctrine of greater good but by a two-step test to figure the greater evil. By asking just two questions. First: Which side is at war the world over? Hamas is not a local militia fighting a localised war. It is one of the hundreds of heads attached to a much larger body called Islamism. Hamas, Al Qaeda, ISIS, Lashkar-e-Toiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Al Shabab, Boko Haram or the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army are different faces of the same monster called global jihad. Islamism is the world’s most determined and amoral expansionist force armed with an unfiltered medieval ideology and modern tech. In October, month of the kibbutz massacre, 2,036 people were killed in the name of Islam just in widely reported cases. A website named The Religion of Peace tracked 147 such attacks across 26 countries. Islamists are at war with local populations from China to Europe, Myanmar to the US, Sri Lanka to Sudan, and Indian to Nigeria. In contrast, Jews are fighting to save their piece of land — mentioned for over 3,000 years as the land of Israel — surrounded by enemies. They are not involved in a single war elsewhere. It has repeatedly offered to coexist in a two-nation arrangement, but Palestinians have stuck to the slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Palestinians elect a terror organisation like Hamas to govern Gaza, fills its ranks with its children, and have never held a protest about Hamas using billions of dollars worth aid on building tunnels under schools and hospitals so it can hide behind the helpless, kill with impunity and feign victimhood. The hunger for endless war, brutalities and conquests is clearly an Islamist and not Zionist trait. Second: Who lies, and lives in stubborn denial? Sara Greenberg, an ex-foreign affairs adviser to the Israeli prime minister, said eloquently at the Los Angeles event: “We not only need to defend ourselves: We also need to defend the truth. Just as there are those who deny the Holocaust, there are those who are attempting to deny and distort the atrocities committed by Hamas, despite the fact that the Hamas terrorists documented the attacks themselves.” Even in the face of incontrovertible evidence, Islamists and Leftists who form the bulk of pro-Palestinian groups have kept denying that Hamas went beyond all accepted norms of warfare to brutalise Israelis. They have even concocted stories about Hamas terrorists being kind to the hostages, trying to paint one of the world’s most brutal terror groups as little more than an abrasive NGO fired up by a just cause. The normalising of gore is so total that at dozens of street corners and on campuses, they have torn down or defaced photos of the Israeli hostages. Their extent of denial is so deep that Islamists and their Leftist handlers in European Parliaments keep flashing words like ‘genocide’. In which genocide do the ‘victims’ (Hamas, according to the pro-Palestine lobby) kill nearly 1,400 people in a single day? The Gaza deception and sympathy porn is so entrenched that a number of heart-rending images of so-called victims of IDF bombings have been exposed as staged photoshoots. Israel is no saint. It is guilty of unleashing enormous collateral damage to either defend itself or avenge attacks. But it is not an expansionist force or the face of one. It does not revel in inhuman torture and degrading while killing the enemy. Its bombs may kill babies as an unwitting damage. But it does not bake babies wilfully in ovens or behead them. Choosing a side in the Israel-Palestine conflict may not be easy on the face of it, but think of the greater evil and it becomes clear. The author is contributing editor, Firstpost. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.