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Hamas
Wants to Die
by David P. Goldman
PJ Media
July 15, 2014
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Originally published by PJ Media under the title, "Hamas
is the Norm, Israel is the Exception."
It's like the old joke: Why do Jewish men die before their wives?
Because they want to. Civilizations for the most part die because they no
longer want to live. That is the nub of my 2011 book How
Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying, Too). They cease to
believe in their own future and distract themselves from the prospect of
extinction as best they can. Hellenistic Greece was the first universal
demographic disaster; it gave us prototypes of the steam engine and the
computer (via Hero of Alexandria) as well as the modern literary forms.
But even wealthy men exposed their daughters and the population imploded.
When Aristotle taught that men naturally seek the good, the overwhelming
preponderance of evidence had already turned against him. Most men seek
nothingness. Soon the last surviving remnants of the classical world will
disappear. In another generation, more people will speak Hebrew than
Greek.
Hamas wants to die, obviously and visibly. That thought horrifies Westerners.
As a number of Israeli commentators observe, Hamas doesn't particularly
care about having a Palestinian State. It wants to destroy the Jewish
State and is willing to die in the process. It wants to die in such a way
that Israel will die, too. There is something utterly surreal to Hamas
crowding civilians around military targets, and Israeli pilots declining
to attack them. It recalls joke about the sadist and the masochist. The
masochist says, "Beat me!," and the sadist says, No…suffer."
Hamas, to be sure, proposes to die in an accelerated time frame and a
particularly disgusting fashion, but it should be kept in mind that
self-willed extinction is the norm. West of the Indus, Israel is the only
survivor among the thousands of little nations that flourished between
10,000 BC and 600 AD. To be sure, there have been plenty of small tribes
that wanted to live but were trampled by conquering hordes. The rule,
however, is that civilizations die of their own disgust with life. Most
of the industrial nations are dying, some very quickly. Most of the
Muslim world would rather die than accommodate modernity (although some
of it may choose to cease to be Islamic).
I do not mean to sound cruel, but the best thing you can do for
victims of a dying culture is: Don't be one of them. Individuals who want
to live have the option of changing cultures. I do not mean that Israel
(or anyone else) should go about killing off enemies in order to satisfy
their death wish. God forbid: life is still sacred to us even if it is
repugnant to them. Neither do we have to commit suicide in order to
accommodate our crazy neighbor's death-wish. We might try to talk him
down from the roof, but we are entitled to step aside when he jumps. It
is not in our power to persuade suicidal civilizations to carry on
living. Ultimately it is our job to contain the damage to ourselves. We
cannot help but accept some civilian deaths while engaging an enemy that
seeks the maximum number of civilian casualties.
All of this is anathema to liberals, whose premise is that human
agency can fix all problems. Enlightenment materialism posited a natural
man who either sought self-preservation (Hobbes) or naturally pursued his
own best interests (Locke) or was inherently good before corrupted by
civilization (Rousseau). Satanic laughter from around the Levant drowns
out the squeaky, thin voices of the Enlightenment. One no longer needs to
read about it in books. The Middle East has become "How
Civilizations Die: The Reality Show."
Israel is the only developed nation (with a fertility rate of three)
that loves life sufficiently to bring more children into the world than
are required to replace the existing population. Even the US has fallen
below replacement as Hispanics assimilate into Western culture and younger
evangelicals behave more like their secular peers. Israel today, as at
the time of the prophets, remains a unique and irreplaceable light unto
the world, the paragon of a nation, the hope of all humanity. Today it is
the proof that modern men and women can embrace life and raise themselves
above the tragic fate of the peoples since the dawn of man. Anti-semitism
is the vicious grudge that death harbors against life. We are tired of
refuting the clumsy calumnies that are thrown at Israel each day in the liberal
media. Our response is in the imperative: "Choose life!"
David P. Goldman is Senior Fellow at the London Center for Policy
Research and Wax Family Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
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