I’ve been writing and editing on this topic for weeks now, whenever I’ve had a chance between working on my business, a recent vacation, and other responsibilities. Due to the gravity of the topic, I’m especially concerned about clearly articulating and organizing my thoughts.

However, I want to make my position known. There is no mincing words on this. Hamas is an organization of savage terrorists. Their October 7th massacre of civilians in Israel was barbaric and fully condemnable. There should be no equivocating or contextualizing from anyone in civilized society.

I feel sick every time I see a rally in support of such violence. Supposedly educated people say things like, “This didn’t happen in a vacuum!” I have to question their sanity and basic human decency. When we have a dispute and all negotiations have broken down, militaries of the 21st century kill each other’s military combatants. We destroy each other’s military installations and seek to control strategic resources. We do not rape civilian women, kidnap civilian men, women, and children, or decapitate babies. That is never justified. It’s a dystopian circumstance in which we live that this needs to be stated. It’s a disgusting state of affairs that anyone in my country would show anything but repugnance toward even implicit support of these acts.

Now that I’ve made my position known, I want to address the equivocators—those who would respond that Gazans are prisoners living in horrendous conditions imposed by Israel and that this was an act of rebellion. Let’s do a thought experiment. Use your imagination to the best of your ability and put yourself in the shoes of a prisoner. Imagine you and your family are in the worst prison in the world. Maybe it’s Guantanamo, maybe the Soviet Gulag. You’re fed the most disgusting food, drink filthy water, receive the barest medical treatment under the strictest penal conditions, and all this is barely keeping you alive. You are there for years upon years. Some of your family have even been killed in brutal beatings and random acts of violence against prisoners. This is practically all you know anymore.

Now imagine that one day, you finally chip away a hole in the wall of this prison. You wave your friends and family through the hole and follow them, running, into a nearby town. It’s inhabited by the friends and family of your captors. Do you grab some weapons and run to a concert full of unarmed, innocent people and shoot their men and children while raping their young women? Do you wrestle crying infants from mothers’ arms and cut off their guiltless heads? Why not? What kind of person would you be?

Unfortunately this does not even give you a good picture of the people that make up Hamas (and the PIJ). These groups are jihadis. They don’t care about the liberation of the Palestinian people. They don’t care about land or freedom. They only care about glorifying Allah in a holy crusade against non-Muslims. If you’ve never experienced true religious zeal— approached the overwhelming and life-deranging idea that this life doesn’t matter at all in except as a route to an eternity in paradise—you cannot possibly understand the mentality of Hamas. They are honest about it, but we in the West treat our religions so casually that we don’t believe these people when they say that they want to die while killing Jews, Christians, atheists, moderate Muslims (all of which are “infidels”), and even their own children. Those people we hold dear and sacred are simply objects… in a fleeting dream they will not even remember once acts of glorious violence propel them into eternal life with a harem of virgin concubines. It sounds so ridiculous our strongest tendency is to laugh. But they are dead fucking serious. Baby eviscerating, gang raping, blood-lusting serious. And they’ve shown us. Do you believe them yet?

This is the group that governs Palestine by force. One might be tempted to worry that average-Joe-Palestinian doesn’t want this and doesn’t support these terrorist tactics. That is true of some or most of those civilians. But they are powerless to do anything outside the will of Hamas. Palestinians are meat shields to Hamas. Less than meat shields. Hamas militants will happily kill their own civilian men, women, and children to advance jihad. They’ll kill their own people to gain sympathy from the West. “Look what the Israelis have done to our people.” This only works because we value all human life and they value none. Fighting Hamas (and the PIJ, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, Houthis, etc.) is asymmetric warfare of the most gruesome kind.

I stand with Israel—not because I think they are innocent of killing or oppressing Palestinians or because I care about what land they want to occupy. I am on their side because they are on the side of civilized moral progress. In the Middle East, they are an oasis of a nation that shares our value for human life, liberty, and happiness, surrounded by literal suicidal homicidal religious zealots. I don’t use the word “literal” hyperbolically here, as has become common practice.

In combating jihadists, innocent civilians die. Comparing Hamas and Israel, the difference in their tactics is just as night-and-day as their values. The IDF goes out of its way to avoid killing innocent civilians. This is perfectly exemplified in the resources they spend inventing military techniques that try to help civilians evacuate buildings before destroying them. “Why are civilians holed up in Palestinian military facilities?” you might reasonably ask. But you already know the answer. Hamas doesn’t care if they die wants them to die. Civilians are useless except as future fellow jihadis, meat shields, or mutilated Instagram models that gain them sympathy and funding from the West. Hamas fires rockets from schoolyards and stores munitions in hospitals for the very same reason. None of this is difficult to understand if you can grok one simple fact that neither group would dispute:

Israel literally wants to live and Hamas literally wants to die. We should want to help them both.

P.S. I spent no time editing this. Please forgive and inform me of any mistakes I have made.