Our refusal to damn sadistic, wicked Hamas shames our society
The defining characteristic of a society is its ability to tell wrong from right. Without this, it merely is a structured mob. Of all moral phenomena, the most important to identify is evil, the black heart of wrong. A society that does not know evil is a morally failed state.
We have long assumed that evil was self-evident, spoke for itself, we literally could smell it.
But for Australia, this now is an empty boast.
Our apologies, our squirming, our twisting and our excuses for the butchery by Hamas, both directly of Israelis and through the expedience of Palestinians, show us for what we really are. A nation that can stare naked evil in the eye and not recognise it. Or even smile, sheepishly. This is not merely shameful, it is a national indictment of moral inadequacy. In these days of click morality and reality television ethics we do not talk much about evil, which is why we urgently should start now.
No one is evil simply because they are stupid, ignorant, stubborn or even abusive. Evil is the quality that comes right at the sickening end of a wide scale of perceived turpitude. At the opposite end is mere disagreement, even irresponsible disagreement. We often regard those who disagree with us as morally deficient. Normally, this is incorrect. Even the stupid are entitled to their opinions.
Next is wrongness. Any person can do something that is unequivocally wrong. Typically, they will be acting immorally, illegally or both, but this does not actually compromise their being or, as we used to say, their soul.
Then there is badness, a much more intense concept. A person or action that is bad involves a fundamental moral failure. The very character of the individual or act is tainted.
There are easy practical examples. In the recent Indigenous voice referendum a lot of people passionately disagreed with each other. Overwhelmingly, they were not bad people, though some on each side were better informed than others.
Next up, it is indeed wrong to defame, evade tax, steal, punch someone or commit adultery. For some of these, but perhaps not the right ones, the law will punish you.
At the next, much worse level, badness is exemplified by all forms of sexual abuse and the vast majority of homicides. It involves the wicked actions of wicked people. These are detestable and typically attract harsh punishment.
But it takes an element of intense, sequenced, deliberate horror to raise even these types of acts to the innermost circle of intended hell. That is evil.
If you are religious, you spend a fair amount of time thinking about evil, sometimes too much. But when something happens like the Hamas atrocities, you do get an awful chance to check your perceptions.
Evil seems to have three elements. First, the action itself is deeply and clearly wrong. This is an objective test. For example, deadly assault is unequivocally wrong.
Second, the perpetrator must understand the utter wrongness of their actions in terms of consequences. A sequential sexual abuser knows exactly how much the victims and their families will suffer.
But it is the third crucial element that is truly chilling. Evil does not just happen, it revels. It delights in itself. It celebrates its horrors. It flaunts its pain. Evil, not power, is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
It is no wonder that in the Catholic sacrament of baptism, the godparents denounce not only Satan but “the glamour of evil”. Real evil is alluring, glittery and to its dedicatees, enormous fun.
Think of Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels and their exterminations. That race massacre was not merely grim duty. It was something to be celebrated, the subject of boasting and even of jest. The Nazis danced around the fires of the Holocaust. Likewise, in his liquidations of real and imagined opponents, Joseph Stalin luxuriated in his power to kill, and its exercise. He would contemplate killings and their details with pleasured satisfaction, and sometimes elation.
On these criteria, the actions of Hamas since October 7 have been undiminished evil. Overall, they comprise a Goya masterpiece of horror. But their atrocities also excel against every standard of gross criminality.
Objectively and regardless of any argued justification, Hamas’s actions are irredeemably wrong. Murder, kidnapping, rape, genital mutilation, brutal beheading, the slaughter of innocents, ritual violent humiliation, mind-breaking mental torment – let alone the sacrifice of your own people to protect yourselves – all are outrages against humanity.
This is true in any war, even a supposedly just war.
Hamas knows exactly the appalling consequences of its actions. When you behead someone with a shovel, you understand what you are doing. When you slaughter an infant, your eyes are open not only to its death but to the anguish of its parents.
When you positively foment war with Israel to further your own status and power, you intend the deaths of your countrymen. You comprehend the cynical exploitation of lives, homes and families, proxy murder through use as human shields, mass dislocation and homelessness, and utter destruction of hope.
This intended expenditure of Palestinian lives to serve as propaganda bargaining chips, while posturing piously as their saviours, is an intrinsic part of the evil of Hamas. Cynical, duplicitous, utterly uncaring, it reminds you of Don McLean’s line from American Pie: “I saw Satan laughing with delight”.
As to that delight, who could miss the sheer elation of the actual perpetrators of all this death and despair: the dancing over bodies, the exultant cries of victory around shattered families, the humiliating parade of shuffling captives.
But worst is the chilling tones of self-satisfaction from the Hamas leadership and its spokesmen as they delineate demands and sentences. We have slaughtered you. You deserved it. We will keep doing it. We will annihilate you, from the river to the sea, you Jews.
And what are a few more dead Palestinian donkey herders along the way? Such pride. Such self-glory. Such grim joy. Such evil.
It is not easy to identify entire courses of events, as opposed to particular episodes or individuals, that rival this slaughterous absence of humanity. Certainly the Holocaust, and probably the Armenian genocide, but what else?
In my own family history is the Potato Famine. There is no doubt there were English politicians and landlords who genuinely saw the opportunity to “thin” the croppy population, and those individuals were evil. But even in the fullness of my anger, I cannot believe the British polity as such intended mass killings of Irish people. Criminal negligence, yes. Conscious mass murder like Hamas, a reluctant no.
Yet in the face of the systemic atrocity that is Hamas, some Australians – especially on the left – cannot pronounce the word evil.
Instead they peddle excuses, justifications and countercharges. Israel asked for it. The Israelis took Palestinian land. The state of Israel is historically illegitimate. Israel is bombing Gaza and killing civilians. It is not observing international law.
This is where avoidance of the E-word is so important. You can justify a lot by counteraccusation and quibbles. But you cannot excuse outright evil.
Part of this leftist indifference is founded in a chilling reality. These murders and rapes by professional extremists are not merely an attack on Israel but on the West and its whole compromised, ragged but glorious embrace of tolerance, civility and urbanity.
Tel Aviv is a proxy for London, Paris and Sydney.
So, because our own radical disrupters as a matter of principle detest the Western culture of capitalists, conservatives and cronies, they parlay with monsters who wage war against the society that protects their right to dissent. Monsters who would eliminate them at the first opportunity.
This is why we should not simply talk of Israel under attack, Israel fighting a war, Israel making hard decisions. In this sort of cultural dirty-bomb assault against Western values, there is no Israel, only a greater us. As far as Hamas and its allies are concerned, we all wear kippahs now.
Exactly why we in the West have cancelled the concept of evil is complex.
Probably the decline of religion is involved. For all their nuance, Christianity and Judaism – to name but two faiths – have the moral confidence to stigmatise the appallingly wrong. Perhaps modernist ethical codes are good with playground behaviour and accountancy but not terrorism.
Maybe it has been the declining acceptance of the personification of evil. If you believe in Satan, you will detest his instruments. Identify them, and you have evil.
Certainly, the universality of psychological explanation is in play. We rationalise bad people by their upbringing and mental illnesses. We can even categorise every act of evil as yet another symptom of unfortunate psychopathy. But anyone who believes Hitler and Hamas are just failures of psychiatric sanitation need therapy themselves.
Moral relativism and postmodernism clearly play a part. If there is no such thing as truth, then there is no such thing as evil, its ultimate enemy. Then again, even French philosopher Michel Foucault believed in right and wrong, provided he was sole arbiter.
There certainly has been a change in the way Australians visualise right and wrong. Historically, we were focused on relatively specific vices with easily identifiable outcomes. We were most opposed to obvious ills such as violence and dishonesty, and their consequences such as fraud, robbery and murder. Even something such as World War II had an immediate focus: the defeat of fascism, the overthrow of its regimes and the destruction of its very nasty ideology. Now we deal with much vaguer concepts of wrong, with less clear markers and remoter effects.
We really like combating climate change because it is an amorphously uplifting cause, we feel good when we do it, and we can safely revile its supposed authors without ever actually having to sacrifice much ourselves.
Possibly the last cause is societal triviality. Does a society obsessed with social media, consumption and the infinite definition of microscopic identities really have any use for archaic concepts such as evil? Does it have an X presence?
Of course, the other great unanswered question is why, when evil roams, it always stalks the Jews? Their own blackly humorous answer is because, like turkey at Christmas, it simply is a matter of tradition.
There are other theories. Serious historians point to medieval realities that promoted hatred of Jews, such as their monopoly on lending money, usury being forbidden to Christians. Others argue the wider population is simply jealous, given the staggering intellectual and other achievements of so many Jews.
Some maintain that Jews have always been the “other”, perennial outsiders in an intolerant world. This gets closer.
The real charge against the Jews is their unforgivable authenticity and agelessness.
Before Karl Marx (himself a Jew), Napoleon, Caesar and Alexander, even before the millennia-old Catholic Church and Christianity itself, there were the Jews. They are still here, a race, a religion and a culture.
The ancient Greeks and the Romans have gone, with their religions and their daily languages. Christianity fights for survival. But somehow the Jews survive, a standing reproach to our own vulnerability.
To the monsters of the right, the Jews offend by their persistent difference. They are indefatigable and indigestible. They will never conform to some mere creed of nationalism.
To the louche left, they offend because of their unswerving commitment to truth as they have inherited it. As a people, they will never be dispersed by assurances they do not really exist or that He Who Is represents a mere phantasm.
In reality, as its oldest continuous intellectual culture, the Jews are indispensable to the West. They are in the truest sense its cultural aborigines.
The cruel irony is that just as the mainstream West struggles to abandon its historic anti-Semitism, the Jews now are detested by emanations of evil such as Hamas. They are hated not merely because they occupy territory or fight wars but because they represent that Greatest Satan, the West.
We of the West should recognise fellow souls when we see them.
Greg Craven was vice-chancellor and president of the Australian Catholic University from 2008 to 2021.
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