What ideological gymnastics are required to justify the murderous rage inflicted Saturday on Israeli civilians, families, elderly, women, children, and babies by the savage cowards who call themselves Hamas? As importantly, why would anyone want to defend such evil?

Warmongers who profit from armed conflict either politically or economically have long come to the defense of any who can reasonably be painted as “freedom fighters” struggling against an oppressive occupying force. There’s sense to that. But no such argument can be made of the naked evil on display in Gaza; the beheading of children, raping and killing grandmothers, burning hostages alive, and then using the victims’ own phones to upload videos of their barbarity.   

Even pro-Palestine activists must note that the cowards of Hamas didn’t target the Israeli military or even the Israeli government. They purposely targeted residential neighborhoods and unleashed their Jew hatred in ways designed to inflict maximum pain on the most defenseless people.

Yet still, Leftist members of Congress such as Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, Rashida Talib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Greg Casar, and Jamaal “Fire Alarm” Bowman are joined by blue-state legislators and a horrifying number of people at “Pro-Palestine” rallies held to applaud these primitive, cowardly acts of evil and even demand sanctions on the victims. These moral midgets cheer attacks on the most helpless civilians as if they represent a courageous victory for “Palestine.”

The entire civilized world once joined in condemning the horrors of the Holocaust. “Never again!” all said as the stories of horrifying cruelty and photos of emaciated camp survivors emerged. But today, Jew hatred again animates rallies defending perpetrators of evil that rivals the worst of German Nazi atrocities. Demonic chants of “gas the Jew” can be heard from crowds of people we would have considered, only days ago, to be civilized members of a modern and enlightened society.   

In the absence of condemnation, that hatred is growing like a deadly contagion.

WHY?

What, specifically, is driving this global moral regression?

We’ve often heard that good people need only do nothing for evil to prosper. This may well be so, but evil prospers more and does so faster when “good” people throw their support behind the destructive campaigns of evil-doers. In their zeal to win the approval of the most influential, many have actively aligned with those who seek to abolish every civilizing doctrine, virtue, and moral teaching of Western Civilization.

The “good Germans” of Nazi Germany illustrated the free hand granted to evildoers when the “good” do nothing. But the “well-meaning” Leftists of contemporary Western nations, people who lend political support to the willful erosion of both moral boundaries and national borders, are pouring gasoline on Hell’s raging fires.     

The foundation of Western Civilization, of morality itself, is respect for the equal standing of each person’s life and rights. This is our moral, legal, and ethical bedrock because it empowers the individual, thereby distributing political influence, facilitating specialization, generating limitless economic opportunity, and permitting the peaceable, consenting, and interdependent exchange on which prosperity and progress rely. That a peaceable, prosperous society requires respect for each individual isn’t merely a political theory; it is an observable fact proven by centuries of human history.

If this foundational doctrine is not mindfully and purposefully passed from one generation to the next, it is lost. Societal regression and collapse become inevitable when a society permits the disintegration of its own foundation.

Respect for the equal standing of individuals is being purposefully replaced by the Marxist notion of “social justice,” an authoritarian pursuit of statistical parity among officially recognized factions. “Social Justice” entrusts authorities with limitless power to engineer society at the direct expense of individual standing. In this aspect, it is not only immoral but anti-morality. Every atrocious infringement against the individual becomes acceptable when authentic morality is opposed.

The destructiveness of replacing respect for individuals with a pursuit of “social justice” isn’t limited to the creation of a monstrous, tyrannical government. It also de-moralizes the citizenry, by which I mean it strips its subscribers of both inclination and capacity for right moral thinking.   

For decades now, the West has been under psyop siege by powerfully aligned global forces working through the likes of the UN, WEF, and WHO to undermine subscription to the civilizing, Judeo/Christian doctrines on which Western Civilization is built.

Aggressive secularization has been sold to the public as “progress.”

The (intended) result:

Enormous swaths of the population in many Western Countries have been taught that discerning right from wrong is a religious act, unfit for public life or discourse. They are, therefore, unwilling or unable to discern good from evil, right from wrong, victim from perpetrator, soldier from civilian, earning from theft, legal from illegal, etc. To discern is a prerequisite for critical thinking. People who’ve been disabused of their ability to discern are handicapped.

Considering the massive and surprisingly successful campaign to supplant the West’s moral foundation with ideologies that omit moral regard for individuals altogether, it cannot be surprising that some have been so damaged as to cheer the beheading of a child. Such people are likely now beyond human help.

But for the love of God, we must ensure that they and their kind cannot prevail.

Images: AP collage