A brutal clarity

The Hamas invasion of Israel represents one of those tragic events that lay to rest certain pernicious ideas, including:

■ That paying ransoms to terrorists for the release of hostages is wise and even “compassionate.”

Only the willfully blind can fail to notice the link between the Biden administration unfreezing $6 billion in Iranian assets in return for the release of Americans held in Iran and the subsequent mass hostage-taking that Iran-sponsored Hamas engaged in.

More Americans were killed in the first day of fighting than were rescued by the Biden deal and new hostages have been taken, presumably for purposes of similar ransom.

If you reward hostage-taking, more hostages get taken in hope of reward, and the practice becomes routine for bad actors, with a consequent decline in international norms and thus security for everyone.

As painful as it might be when it comes to particular cases, the only way to deter hostage-taking is for governments to loudly declare and then firmly follow a policy of never rewarding it, coupled with guarantees of overwhelming punishment for the hostage-takers.

■ That terrorists are actually just “militants” or even “freedom fighters.”

No, you are not a “freedom fighter” or a “militant” when you murder grandmothers and behead babies.

There is no political cause or any degree of oppression that can justify such atrocities, and the people who enable them with false equivalencies (think MSNBC and the Squad and Black Lives Matter) are as disgusting as Hamas.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre for once got it precisely right when she noted, in response to some Democrats who criticized Israel rather than those who had attacked it, that “Our condemnation belongs squarely with terrorists who have brutally murdered, raped, and kidnapped hundreds of Israelis. There can be no equivocation about that.

There are not two sides here.”

Equally appropriate was President Biden’s assertion that, “Like every nation in the world, Israel has the right to respond, indeed has a duty to respond, to these vicious attacks.”

Democrats like Rashida Tlaib (Michigan) and Cori Bush (Missouri) who claim otherwise should be ashamed of themselves. So too those who voted them into office.

From the nature of their comments in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks, one would think that they celebrated 9/11 and have posters of Osama bin Laden hanging in their congressional offices.

That there can be any kind of peaceful co-existence with a jihadist terrorist state like Iran.

The longtime hope of the Obama and now the Biden administration that some kind of historic rapprochement with Iran could be achieved by American accommodation (appeasement) of the mullahs was always based on a fundamental logical flaw—the idea that those who rule Iran want to be part of a peaceful community of nation-states.

To the contrary, the regime in Tehran holds power only to the extent that it sets itself against the rest of the world. It has no interest in becoming part of any “rule-based international community” because it would have no rationale for existence if it were. It must reject peace with other nations because it must remain a “revolution in power.”

The approach itself is self-refuting, in the sense of means undermining ends: that you can use a hostage-for-money exchange agreement with a regime that takes hostages for money as a basis of normalizing diplomatic relations with it.

■ That Iran has long been the world’s leading sponsor of international terrorism, currently fully revealed as such, should tell us that it is not a “normal” nation.

What is happening in Israel should finally mean the end of the Iran nuclear deal and the re-acquisition of a firm commitment to prevent the mullahs from ever acquiring nuclear weapons, through whatever means necessary.

■ That it is possible to support Hamas without being antisemitic.

For years now, critics of Israel and supporters of the Palestinians have claimed that there is nothing antisemitic in their position; that one need not necessarily follow from the other.

That has seemed plausible on the surface but is now revealed as a lie— you cannot hold demonstrations on behalf of the Palestinian cause just hours after those ruling the Gaza Strip (Hamas) engaged in the worst slaughter of innocent Jews since the Holocaust.

Opposition to Israeli policies isn’t necessarily antisemitic, but opposition to the existence of a Jewish state called Israel most certainly is, and opposition to the existence of Israel is the fundamental principle of Hamas, not because the Jews are “occupiers” or “colonists,” but because they are simply Jews.

Hamas doesn’t and never has supported a “two-state” solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict because that solution would still allow Israel to exist.

As unfortunate as it might be to admit, the distinction between the “aspirations of the Palestinian people” and the aspirations of Hamas is not nearly as great as some claim, given the lack of evidence that Palestinians living under Hamas rule in Gaza reject the barbaric aspirations of their rulers.

In short, there are times for qualifiers and caveats, but the past week shouldn’t have been one of them. Only condemnation without qualifier or caveat was called for.

At least for those of us with any moral sense.