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This column rarely agrees with President Joseph Biden and has never quoted him. That was before the horrific, unconscionable attacks of Oct. 7 that killed 1,400 Israelis and led to 230 hostages being taken to Gaza.
“The terrorist group Hamas unleashed pure, unadulterated evil in the world. But sadly, the Jewish people know, perhaps better than anyone, that there is no limit to the depravity of people when they want to inflict pain on others,” the president rightly said during an Oval Office address to the nation.
Such evil—pure, unadulterated evil—is impossible to fathom or understand. It was all the harder for me because I visited Kfar Aza, one of the hardest hit kibbutzim, in November 2017.
I’m sure some of the 100-plus killed there helped host us six years ago. We walked through the nursery where 40 babies were killed, some beheaded and/or burned, murdered in this pre-dawn surprise attack on a collectivist farming community of perhaps 750 souls near the Gaza-Israel border. We saw the homes and buildings that are now scarred and stained by bullet holes, blast marks and blood.
This degree of inhumanity is incomprehensible and inexcusable. There is no way to explain it, but the famed author and theologian C.S. Lewis helps with this insight from one of his most popular works, “The Screwtape Letters”. The book is a series of letters from an elder, senior demon to his young understudy demon.
Screwtape, the elder, writes to Wormwood, the younger, in Letter 29:
“In peace we can make many of them ignore good and evil entirely; in danger, the issue is forced upon them in a guise to which even we cannot blind them. There is here a cruel dilemma before us. If we promoted justice and charity among men, we should be playing directly into the Enemy’s hands; but if we guide them to the opposite behavior, this sooner or later produces (for He permits it to produce) a war or a revolution, and the undisguisable issue of cowardice or courage awakes thousands of men from moral stupor.
“This, indeed, is probably one of the Enemy’s motives for creating a dangerous world.”
Lewis goes on to write that courage is the fountainhead of all virtues, and the present moment calls us to summon courage along with conviction to stand with Israel and our Jewish brothers and sisters across the globe as we are all shaken from a moral stupor.
For Christians, this imperative has even deeper roots that nourish the faith.
“The Jewish religion is not external to us, but in a certain sense belongs internally to our religion. Therefore, we have relations to her which we have nowhere else with any other religion. You are our privileged brothers, in a certain way, we could say, our elder brothers,” declared Pope John Paul II. Protestants largely agree with this view.
So, in response to these horrifying terrorism acts, the West in general, and America in particular, must stand with courage to fight back the hatred and extreme animus that threatens Israel as a nation and the well-being of Jews worldwide.
Courage, not cowardice, is the call. This must be true on woke college campuses, world capitals and in our own U.S. capital.
We can disagree with Israel and how she proceeds to defend herself. But we cannot equate what Hamas did—the brutal, ruthless slaughter of innocents—with a nation or a people’s right to self-defense.
We must declare and defend this pillar of international law and order at the heart of America’s role as the custodian of freedom and the protector of human dignity. And the Christian church should be at the forefront.•
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Smith is chairman of the Indiana Family Institute and author of “Deicide: Why Eliminating The Deity is Destroying America.” Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.
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