We must condemn those who support terror

ONE of the very first pieces of verse that I ever memorized was this, from Pastor Martin Neimoller:

“First they came for the communists / and I did not speak out / because I was not a communist.

“Then they came for the socialists / and I did not speak out / because I was not a socialist.

“Then they came for the trade unionists / and I did not speak out / because I was not a trade unionist.

“Then they came for the Jews / and I did not speak out / because I was not a Jew.

“Then they came for me / and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

I think of these words often because I deal with oppression and human rights violations on a daily basis. My work, cherished as it is, brings me face-toface with the ugliest parts of humanity.

I have clients who have been raped, kidnapped, tortured, barred from their churches, stripped of their livelihoods, threatened with death and almost killed. And in each of these cases, there is that one single truth at play: Had there been someone who stepped up and said something to defend or protect them, they might not have been refugees.

We need to speak out when we see injustice. We need to speak out clearly, unequivocally and without the kind of whataboutism that often infects our conversations. And that is why we need to condemn Hamas and all of those who support it and voted for it.

Palestinian terrorists have the agency that God gives to all of his creation, what we Catholics call “free will.” They understand the consequences of their actions, and that makes those actions even more repellent than their inherent nature because those consequences are not inevitable.

As a child, I remember Black September, the group that kidnapped and murdered Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. In 1972 I was only 10 years old, and yet I understood that evil had been unleashed on the world. Those Olympics were a continent away, and yet I remember feeling unsafe in my sweet little home.

That is what the presence of evil does, it transcends time and space, air and ocean to reach us.

The evil perpetrated by Hamas this month is that same evil, only magnified. While the murder of innocent adult athletes was a horror that forever changed the political landscape, the more recent acts of barbarism against Jews in Gaza seem to dwarf it.

That is because the murdered now include teenagers at a concert, elderly couples and the most diabolical of all acts, the decapitation and murder of babies.

Nothing justifies it, and people such as AOC and Rashida Tlaib are beneath contempt for even making the attempt. These are bad people. These are truly evil, in their own right.

And unless we stand up and condemn them as well as the perpetrators of these crimes, we become like the person who remained silent as the communists, the socialists, the trade unionists and the Jews … the Jews … were destroyed.

And by not speaking out in black-and-white terms, demanding justice only for the Israelis whose blood was shed by those who shed their own humanity, we will be next.

They will not come for us with knives, and guns and screams. They will have already annihilated our very souls, and that is the most precious possession of all.