SPENGLER: Horror and Humiliation in Gaza.
Like the Nazis, Islamist terrorism weaponized horror to demoralize the West. Christianity has a soft underbelly: It struggles to reconcile belief in a God who so loved the world that He sacrificed Himself for its salvation with the suffering of innocents. That was the nub of Voltaire’s attack on theodicy after the Lisbon earthquake killed 12,000 in 1755, as well as Ivan Karamazov’s protest that “if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.”
The post-Christian world, which eschews the mystery of Divine Providence in favor of a squeamish urge for earthly salvation, is all the more vulnerable to the theater of horror. The post-Christian West has become paralyzed by the fear that the world is beset by forces hostile to humankind, which J.R.R. Tolkien called “the black breath.”
All too well have the Western-educated, multilingual leaders of Hamas gauged the spiritual state of the West, and invented an atrocious way of conducting war in order to psychically paralyze it. Hamas cannot win a war against Israel, but it has sufficient power to force Israel to fight a war that cost many civilian lives. Whether the civilian death toll is the 32,000 that Hamas claims or the 18,000 estimated by pro-Israeli analysts is of minor importance.
During the U.S. Marines’ siege of Fallujah 20 years ago, I wrote that the battle for that city brought into focus the vulnerabilities of both the Americans and the Sunni resistance. Horror—the perception that cruelty has no purpose and no end—is lethal to the West, which cannot endure without faith in a loving Heavenly Father. For the Islamic world, meanwhile, humiliation—the perception that the ummah cannot reward those who submit to it—is beyond its capacity to endure.
The Muslim world said nothing when between 9,000 and 40,000 civilians died in the 2016-17 campaign against ISIS in Mosul. That involved Muslims (the Iraqi Army with American support) killing Muslims. But Gaza is not merely a slaughter but also a humiliation, the reduction of Hamas, and the displacement of most of the Gaza population. Muslims can accept Muslims killing Muslims, but they can’t abide Jews humiliating Muslims.
This toxic combination of horror and humiliation poisons world opinion against Israel. There is no near-term remedy. Horror elicits irrational responses. Never mind that Hamas forced an urban war upon Israel through unspeakable acts of brutality against Israeli civilians, and that it embeds terrorists in hospitals, schools, and other civilian installations to maximize casualties among its own civilians. Never mind that Israel’s response has occasioned fewer civilian casualties in urban combat than any other fighting force on record.
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