Once upon a time, there was a board game called Risk. It was a war game, billed as a game of world conquest. Every player had a number of armies, and as the game played out, battles would result in each side’s armies either growing or diminishing, until eventually someone wins.
The game depended on an understanding that we all took for granted during the Cold War: that we always knew every participant’s numbers. Looking back on that era, it’s almost incredible:
We discussed our military budget and the Soviet Union’s military budget on television; we shared the data in press releases. We knew how many men were active and how many potentials were in the reserves. We knew how many tanks, fighters, and bombers each side had – maybe not precisely, but close. We knew how many ICBMs each side had, with roughly how many nuclear warheads; they were discussed in the SALT I and SALT II talks. We even signed an ABM treaty to publicly announce how many strictly defensive weapons we allowed ourselves.
This was possible only because both sides were sensible enough to realize that a full-fledged unlimited war between the two then-superpowers would be devastating for both sides no matter who won. Enough information was available that each side would be permanently scared out of starting such a direct conflict. And it was dependent on both sides adhering to the most basic rule of honorable war: that through the use of uniforms, the difference between military and civilian populations would always be clear.
The West does not enjoy this same blessed sanity, in our battle with islamic jihad.
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks of October 7, Israel finally declared its intention to eliminate Hamas at last. Hamas has been a continuously malevolent force since its founding, decades ago; since taking over Gaza in 2006 it has waged relentless war against the civilians of Israel, launching rockets into residential neighborhoods, lobbing chunks of concrete into crowds, sending suicide bombers into markets and buses.
But October 7 was so much, so fast, so severe, that it commanded the attention of the world. For one brief moment, finally, this collective evil – a group happy to shoot up a music festival, to terrorize private homes, to slaughter whole families from babies to the elderly, to gang-rape young women and drive their mutilated bodies around Gaza in a parade, to the cheers of their fellow bloodthirstly Gazans – was on display before the world.
No mask, no PR story could hide this evil. Not this time.
Unfortunately, almost immediately, Israel ran into the problem of numbers: Unlike the SALT talks of the Cold War, unlike the clearly displayed numbers of armies on a Risk board, Israel did not know, going in, how many members Hamas really has – how many targets Israel really has to eliminate from the field in order to permanently remove this threat.
As Westerners, we tell ourselves that people are fundamentally decent; we convince ourselves that the kind of people who would slaughter families and gang-rape innocent girls simply must be a tiny minority.
But we are wrong.
This is a community that has raised its children with one value: the extermination of Jews. Oh, they hate other people too, of course – Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Bahai’is – but the Jews are just across the wall, in Israel, so they get the brunt of this hatred.
The IDF expected to discover many miles of tunnels; they did not expect to see hundreds and hundreds of miles of them. The IDF expected some fanatics to brutally kill innocent civilians; they didn’t expect thousands of such fanatics to slaughter 1400 in a day, take hundreds of prisoners, and be greeted by cheering thousands afterward, back in Gaza. The IDF expected to find many Gaza residences hiding armaments; they didn’t expect to find caches of bullets or mortars or grenades in every other residence.
Yes, that is the most recent revelation – that as the IDF has continued the slow, difficult and dangerous house-to-house / apartment-to-apartment stage of the operation, they are finding weapons caches everywhere. These aren’t the self-defense weapons that American citizens keep handy; these are attack weapons for military operations. And they are everywhere. Every other household is turning out to be a sleeper cell.
Israel knew they would need to kill thousands of terrorists who look like civilians – Hamas members don’t wear a uniform. Some voices warned that active, dangerous members of Hamas numbered in the tens of thousands, possibly in the hundreds of thousands. It’s incredibly hard to tell.
But it comes down to definitions:
A soldier is someone equipped and trained; you see him marching and practicing his marksmanship before he ever appears in battle. You can identify him as a soldier before he ever kills anyone.
By contrast, a terrorist is a believer in an ideology, silent and unnoticed, ready to be activated when told. Until he straps on that suicide vest or charges into that music festival, he may have never done anything terrorism-related in his life. But he still counts; he still is a terrorist in waiting. And without the clear markers of the legitimate soldier, he’s awfully hard to identify. He poses just as much of a threat, probably more so. If you kill him – this terrorist-to-be, this suicide bomber in training – then world opinion will be turned on you for killing someone “who had never even done anything.” Yet.
It is often estimated that “only 10%” of muslims around the world support active jihad. That’s a wild guess, however, with precious little evidence in support, because islam requires practitioners to lie to non-muslims, and because the definition, again, is so hard to pin down.
And what if the estimate is right? There are two billion muslims in the world; if it’s only ten percent we have to worry about, that’s 200 million people in the world who support the mass murder of innocents in the service of their bigotry, their land-lust, their quest for conquest, or their misguided belief that it provides a sure path to Paradise.
What we have seen from Israel’s experience in Gaza is that, if anything, the 10% estimate is too low. From the dancing in the Arab street on Sept 11, 2001 to the apparently identical cheers on October 7, 2023, it is undeniable that the appeal for utter savagery in that community goes well beyond a mere ten percent.
And with this latest discovery that every other household has a weapons cache, that pushes the estimate – at least in Gaza, at least where the IDF has gotten through so far – up to the neighborhood of 50%.
We can take some solace from the knowledge that even the rest of the Arab world detests the Gaza Strip (there is a reason no arab country has offered to solve the problem by welcoming the Gazans as refugees in all these decades). Perhaps the rest of the arab world knew how bad the Gazans are before we did; they could tell from the rhetoric and behavior of Hamas long before we saw it.
But even this knowledge doesn’t help with the problem. There are some 2.5 million people in the Gaza Strip; some are apparently decent, hard-working people who cross into Israel each day to work as normal, diligent employees. These too are victims of Hamas and the jihadists, for they would be logical candidates for Israeli citizenship if the majority of their countrymen weren’t bigoted killers. But whether the enemy that needs to be destroyed is 10% or 50%, either number is likely more than the good-hearted Israelis will be able to bear as a casualty count, however objectively justifiable.
Already world opinion is gradually softening, as people forget the evils of two months ago and are distracted by the new shiny object of the day: pictures of bombed-out tunnels, levelled apartment buildings, and the occasional casualty who looks like a civilian.
What can Israel do? It must work faster, expose as much as it can, and terminate as many opportunities for future terror as possible, but with their customary diligence at avoiding injury to innocents. And this is a job that gets harder every day.
Israel needs the support of the rest of the world to carry on, to resist the jihadist-inspired PR that tries so hard to make Israel look like the bad guy here.
And we too have a role to play, here, both as American individuals and as voters. We must pressure our government to expose and defund the many domestic and international organizations that we now know were directing “humanitarian aid” to Gaza with the full intent of its being used for war all along.
Hamas looks to us like jihad is Israel’s problem now, but we must also look at the big picture:
The jihadist thread that runs throughout islam isn’t only active in Gaza. That same jihadist thread is murdering hundreds of thousands in Asia and millions in Africa. That same jihadist impulse is robbing and raping thousands of women in Europe, and killing thousands of innocents all over western civilization, every year.
There are no more Charles Martels, Don Johns, and John III Sobieskis nowadays, sad to say. But all is not lost; there are world leaders with the courage to speak the truth on these matters. General al-Sisi’s speech to the clerics in January 2015, and President Donald Trump’s speech to the emirs and sheikhs in Riyadh in May 2017, were sterling examples of the way an honorable modern leader should address the issue.
And it is time for our government, and all the governments of the West, to force an end to the use of both international policy and charity dollars in the support of jihadist atrocities.
Copyright 2021 John F Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), are available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
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