Killing babies with a smile

Giulio Meotti describes a court appearance last week by Hakim Awad, one of the two young 'Palestinians' who confessed to, and was convicted of, the murder of five members of the Fogel family in Itamar last March.

In court, Awad always smiled at the camera, just like [9/11 hijacker Mohamed] Atta did. Awad said he has “no regrets” and flashed the "V" sign for victory while he was leaving the courthouse. “I am a person like you, I have no mental condition, I never had a serious illness,” Awad said to the judges. His smile was sincere.

The Fogels’ massacre in Itamar, where two Palestinians murdered babies as deliberately and unabashedly as very few other than the Nazis and Khmer Rouge ever had, has not been deciphered by our writers and intellectuals. It's because we have been told that “they hate us” is the language of xenophobes, the illiberal, the intolerant; that genocidal anti-Semitism was buried in the ashes of Auschwitz; that we have to be polite, sanitized and self-critical.

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A seductive combination of post-colonial white guilt mixed with liberal condescension has dulled our moral senses and made us blind to Awad’s smile; a smirk that conveys unleashed hatred, contempt, physical aggression, the desire to expel, to destroy, and to eliminate the Jews.

Meotti goes on to compare Awad to the Nazis.

It's also the smile of Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief in southeastern France from 1942 to 1944, who laughed all the time when the Jewish victims described the torture at court in 1997. In 2007, a photo album containing 116 rare photographs of senior Nazi officials at the Auschwitz concentration camp was made public by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Josef Mengele, the camp doctor notorious for his medical experiments, is smiling while the gas chambers are operating in Birkenau.

Germany perpetrated the Holocaust not because it had the means to do so, but because its leaders engendered the will to do so. This totalitarian, robotic willingness also lies in Hakim Awad’s smile.

Did anyone suggest making peace with the Nazis? Here's what Winston Churchill had to say on that subject.

The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.

If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

You ask, What is our policy? I will say; “It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.” You ask, What is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory—victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.

We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and the oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fall, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour!”

If Churchill were Prime Minister of Israel today, you can bet that he would not be negotiating with the leaders of a society that produces the likes of Hakim Awad.