Six Months In: The Difference Between Righteous Retribution and Real Genocide

The world response to October 7th is the moral crime here, not the Israeli response

If there is any topic that requires seriousness, it is the topic of genocide.

If there is any sin so profound, any crime so vast, any wrong so awful that it must be treated with the same respect you would treat the body of a murdered child, it is this one.

Because, after all, it is the crime that encompasses many such bodies.

You would think these truths would give pause. You would think people would be both very quick to condemn a real genocide, and very keen to avoid applying the label where it isn’t deserved.

And yes, those two things can be balanced. Very easily, if you have real values rather than modern ones.

But in these times that is not the case.

When the old laws on being respectful were swept aside, the people doing that probably did not think they would be making the world less humane. Respect for the dead is such an old fashioned idea, such a conservative idea.

It’s an idea for priests, and churches, and old inherited rules that were sometimes, shockingly, insisted on by white males.

The 1960’s saw a lot of that being swept away. Deference wasn’t owed to anyone living, and respect wasn’t owed to anyone dead. Why bow your head to anyone? Why observe a minute’s silence? Why visit a grave or obey a father? Sooo boring.

Sweep it all away and start again. We will get morality better this time. It will be based on fairness and softness, on inclusion and equality, not on rules and traditions, or faith and family. Laugh at everything that went before, including the dead. Celebrate whatever is newly here, including the deadly.

Let’s see how that goes.

And we have. God help us, we have.

The people who worry about feelings, worry only about their own feelings. The people who talk about empathy, have no compassion. The people with their eyes fixed on a better kinder future, are the worst and cruelest creatures of the present. The people who say Be Kind, are anything but. The people who weep for Mother Earth, think the human race is a cancer.

And the people who who say they want minorities protected and that diversity is our strength, chase Jews across the campus.

Lots of words that should be treated carefully are thrown around without the slightest thought, or used purely in the pursuit of power. But is there anything quite so obscene as using the word genocide without thinking about it?

Or of applying this word to the most frequent historical victims of it when they dare to defend themselves from it’s latest incarnation?

I tell you I have thought about it. I have thought about this word. I have thought about it before deciding where it applies and where it doesn’t, and I am content that I have done this guided by a morality that isn’t just mine. I have done this guided by what words actually mean….before the meanings are rewritten. I have done this guided by the morality my father held, and his before that, and back, back through generations who knew, far better than I, what real suffering is.

I am a gentile, not a Jew, but I was taught to respect the dead, respect the weight of history, and respect and defend the suffering.

I was taught that facts and morality matter.

I was taught to respect the dead, to treat women with respect too, and that there is nothing more despicable than the murder, rape and torture of women and children.

I was taught to be disgusted by savagery, and I am proud of that.

And my heritage, my blood, was that of those who knew what liberty was, what civilization is, what is good and what is evil. My people confused the two less than others did, despite all slanders to the contrary.

The weight of my history, as an Englishman, knew, knew in my very bones, that what was done on October 7th 2023 was vile beyond words, and that such acts require retribution, righteous anger, and implacable punishment.

These too are very old ideas, ideas we are told we must abandon. Ideas we are told are merely the angry expressions of the Old Testament, utterly alien to our times, and utterly opposed to our ‘modern values’.

But I believe in righteous fury. I believe that if anything deserves a grim, unforgiving, utterly determined response that will not stop and will not relent until justice is served, it’s what happened on October 7th.

The utter depths of barbarity require righteous fury. If you aren’t angry at that, you aren’t human. If you don’t want to hunt down and kill every single one of the perpetrators, you aren’t much of a man, much of a human being, or any bloody use as a government.

All around me, six months since that terrible day, I hear the word genocide. Again and again and again.

And not once do I hear it, from most of the western world, aimed at Hamas.

The people who started the war.

Fuck the bullshit you have read from self-hating kapo Jews, or from hard left Jew haters, or from brain-dead Hollywood celebrities, or from alleged rebel ‘truthers’ on the Right, or from Palestinian and Muslim propaganda.

Fuck the lies about stolen land and colonialism and this mysterious magical kingdom of Palestine stuff (the Palestine that never actually existed as an independent nation for a single day in all of human history).

Forget your dishonestly redrawn maps and your hand me down Soviet propaganda buzzwords.

Forget your leftist, rightist or Islamic indoctrination in the ancient art of blaming the Jews.

Damn you for a pure racist hypocrite, and an ignorant fool besides, if your view of all this is shaped by the idea that the browner skinned side must be the victims (a position which even by its own racist terms doesn’t know just how varied and ‘diverse’ Israeli Jews are).

There was a ceasefire on October 6th.

The IDF were not in Gaza on October 6th.

On October 6th there were no bombs being sent from Israel to Gaza. On October 6th, Palestinians were ruling Palestinians in Gaza. On October 6th, Israel welcomed Palestinian workers into Israel. Israeli’s paid Palestinians for their work. Israelis smiled at and exchanged greetings with Palestinians. Israelis went about an ordinary, peaceful life, wanting the same for their families and friends, and even helping to supply the same for their Palestinian neighbors.

Peace was always there. Always. Perhaps not a perfect version, not a ‘you have everything just as you want it’, version. But the version where you don’t kill Jews and they don’t kill you was ALWAYS there and has operated every time Palestinians stop killing Jews. Every single time.

And the desire for Peace, where is that, exactly?

Many of the Jews slaughtered on October 7th were attending a PEACE concert. Many of them no doubt held some bleeding heart sympathies for the Palestinians, and might have been as utterly ignorant about repeated Israeli attempts at peace from their own government as most westerners are.

These people wanted peace. They wanted Palestinians to live in peace. They wanted Palestinians treated well, and living in safety, and they saw Palestinians as human beings. And while they were doing that and thinking like that, Palestinians were preparing to terrify, gang rape, torture and murder them. To extinguish their lives in a vile orgy of the most savage, backwards, Iron Age barbarity.

Just for being Israelis. Just for being Jews.

The limited peace of October 6th could have held. The promise of a better and lasting peace could have been followed, as it has been available to follow for 70 years, but it asked something of the Palestinians that they could not give.

Not land. Not accepting oppression. Humanity. Restraint. Decency. The ability to go one day, and the next day, and the next, without terrorism, rape and murder.

But they couldn’t. They are in love with death. They boast about it. They sing about it. On October 7th, they once again did it. And they were joyous. They were exultant.

They killed babies and kidnapped terrified children (some of whom they are still holding) and they laughed and enjoyed it, whether as participants or celebrants.

THAT morally requires response. THAT is morally responsible for every death that follows, on either side. Every Palestinian death, as well as every Jewish or Israeli death, was put in place and made inevitable not only by the terrorists of Hamas, without whose disgusting orgy of barbarism none of the rest would have occurred, but by the people of Gaza, by ‘ordinary’ Palestinians.

Those ‘ordinary’ Palestinians who spent months spying on the Israelis who gave them work, so that Hamas could more easily rape and murder them later. Those ‘ordinary’ Palestinians who called October 7th a great day online, or laughed about it, or who watched the footage the terrorists filmed and smiled and delighted in it.

They are as guilty as child abusing perverts who watch footage of children being abused. That’s what they endorsed. That’s they celebrated. It’s what many of them had actually voted for, knowing what Hamas are and the way Hamas behaves.

October 7th increased the popularity of Hamas. Palestinians were happy about October 7th, as if it were a manifesto promise fulfilled. And given what is in the founding charter of Hamas, it was.

Know all that before you talk about ‘innocent Palestinians’.

It’s true though that there is a grotesque moral crime at work, one that follows the originating moral crime of the genocidal actions of Hamas. Its true that this moral crime frames a response to what Hamas did.

But its not a crime from the Israeli government.

It’s a crime from the world. It’s the crime of people like Candace Owens, or Tucker Carlson, or the UN, or anyone who has called the just retribution of the Israelis against the savages of Hamas a ‘genocide’ of innocent Palestinians. It’s a moral crime engaged in by anyone who has called for a ceasefire when the hostages have not all been returned and the perpetrators of October 7th, in some cases, are still alive.

Because what the position of telling the Israelis to stop really represents is telling the Israelis to accept genocide against them. It’s telling the ethnic group who survived the Holocaust to let another one happen. It’s telling them, Israeli Jews, that they are the only people and the only nation on Earth whose mere existence justifies genocide and terrorism against them.

Its saying just die. Just disappear. Just do nothing when your children are murdered.

Thankfully, the Israeli government is too sensible to hear that message, no matter how much of the world says it. It’s a common sense purchased by centuries of real genocide and persecution towards them. They know their survival is at stake.

But it is also a respect for the dead, your own dead, the West has totally forgotten. How great an insult to the dead of October 7th would stopping before Hamas is defeated be? It would be an enormous insult to them, and to their loved ones. It would be a betrayal of past and present suffering, and a promise to the enemies of Israel that they can conduct future murders with impunity, knowing that punishment will stop if the world moans enough.

How better a way to say that you, like your enemies, do not think your lives matter? Only a nation that wants to die would accept other people telling them to stop fighting back.

So the Israeli response is the only sane one. It’s the only moral one. It’s one that must be pursued, no matter how many foreign idiots of the Left, the Right, the alternative or the mainstream, insist otherwise.

And it’s a love of life, the right for your own people to live, the West has also forgotten. The West does not ever really fight for its own or value their existence, but Israel does. We should admire it, and wish them success. The elimination of savage animals like Hamas will, in the long run, be of benefit to Palestinians too.

Nobody is saying ‘ceasefire’ to Palestinians, that’s the great hypocrisy of it. Nobody said ceasefire, for that matter, to America for spending TWENTY YEARS in Afghanistan rather than a mere six months in Gaza. US governments embarked on decades of war in multiple nations when around 3,000 people were killed in one terrorist day of slaughter. But Israelis are told that six months of fighting is too much when one and a half thousand of their civilians are murdered, tortured or abducted. Nobody said ‘ceasefire’ during World War Two which included dropping nuclear bombs on civilians. Discussions of proportionality there took place long after that war was won.

Even today, there’s no consistency of judgement. Which is more justifiable, more sane, more righteous between The ‘War on Terror’ that followed 9/11, or the Israeli war on Hamas terrorists? Six months going after the people who actually did it, or 20 years invading multiple nations that didn’t do it? Perhaps the response to 9/11 would have been somewhat better if the Saudis, the actual most involved nation, had been the decided upon target? Either way, you can’t kill hundreds of thousands of civilians in multiple nations in response to a terrorist attack, and then tell Israel not to attack Hamas in response to a terrorist attack. That makes no sense at all.

And for the ears of the likes of Tucker, who I have admired on other issues but who is fatuously wrong on this one, you can be a patriot of the West who knows that perpetual war is a stupid and crooked game more about profit for the corrupt than protection for the innocent, AND yet still be a traditional moralist who knows that when masses of your citizens are subjected to barbarous cruelty its moral, sensible and completely justified to wipe out the scumbags responsible.

You can and should oppose unnecessary wars on moral grounds, and you can and should support righteous wars on moral grounds too. You do that by a coherent moral framework of your own, and by knowing the meaning of words so that you recognize that Hamas ARE genocidal and Israel IS NOT and by knowing that fighting to end a war waged against you is a far more moral and human thing than initiating that war through savage, barbaric terrorism is.

Show me a war conducted so that corrupt corporations can make money from military contracts and I will condemn it. Show me fourteen centuries of war conducted to spread Islam and I will condemn it. Show me Palestinians or Irish nationalists murdering women and children when peace and negotiation was always available and I will condemn it.

Show me a people previously almost wiped out by lunatics yesterday responding to the same genocidal intent from terrorist enemies today and I will tell you ten thousand times if I have to, at the cost of my own life if need be, that those people are fighting a righteous war that any just God or any fair man would smile upon.