October 7, One Year Later

So much has happened in the year since. Hamas has been largely devastated by Israeli attacks. Huge portions of the Gaza Strip have been reduced to rubble. Many Gazan noncombatants have been killed in the crossfire, though it’s impossible to know how many. Hamas is notorious for exaggerating civilian losses, and yet Western news agencies are quick to report their numbers. What we do know is that Hamas embeds its fighters among civilians, and so even with Israeli precision, thousands are dead. Hamas is still holding at least 97 hostages, including four Americans. 

Even more has happened in the last few weeks. Clearly, the Israelis are intent on putting an end to the threats it faces from all sides. The amazingly coordinated pager attack, which incapacitated hundreds of Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon was followed by a series of “decapitation strikes” that wiped out the leadership of that Iran-backed terrorist group. There are now reports of an Israeli ground incursion into south Lebanon and plans for a massive Israeli retaliation against Iran for its extensive but largely ineffective missile attack. 

To summarize all that has happened in that region over the past year is impossible. We’ve all seen again that, as one theologian has aptly said, this world is not the way it’s supposed to be, and humans have not evolved past the evil that plagues our hearts.  

One enduring expression of that evil is the anti-Semitism that still plagues our world. Phrases taken from Mein Kampf or some medieval pogrom, with very little editing, could match the rhetoric we heard this year from protestors on college campuses and in Western streets. The very same voices have been silent about the hundreds of thousands killed by Syrian forces and their Russian patrons in the ongoing Syrian Civil War. They also have had very little to say about the concentration camps for Muslims in Communist China.  

And so, another thing that has been revealed this past year is just how morally bankrupt Critical Theory is, both as an academic theory and as a cultural mood. The ideas of intersectionality, privilege, and liberation cannot accurately describe, much less address, the human condition. Despite all of the talk of justice and oppression, Critical Theory has failed to make sense of one of the grossest injustices in recent history. 

After all, on this dark day a year ago, a religiously intolerant, misogynistic, anti-science, anti-democratic, and violently anti-LGBTQ group massacred men, women, and children. And yet, many progressive activists chose to champion this group because, according to some crooked intersectional hierarchy of virtue, Hamas spoke up for the oppressed and powerless against privileged Israelis. A moral framework that decides whether mass murder is wrong by who’s doing the murdering is no moral framework at all. 

The brutality of the October 7 attacks revealed how real evil is. We may think notions of human wickedness are outdated, and that humanity has “evolved” beyond such archaic thinking and practice, but that’s the stuff of dreamworld. Like the similarly shocking events of 9/11, there is no way to square the idea of our “enlightened” age with that event. 

As French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy wrote: 

All the strategies of avoidance and containment, all the tricks of conscience, all the conjuring rhetoric that we had been deploying for twenty, fifty, eighty years or more—all of it was pulverized by the Event. Evil was there. Pure evil, plain-faced, gratuitous, senseless. Evil for nothing and for no reason; evil raw and unadorned.

Western societies may have long ago abandoned the Christian vision of the human condition, but horrors like this cut through that naïveté. And yet, the Christian story also proclaims that evil like this will not have the last word. As the father of the Jewish people once proclaimed, there is a judge of all the earth, and He will do what is right. In Christ, He has.