Putting the Lie to Hamas Lies...

List of suicide bombings in Israel

This morning, Fox News had an Hamas spokesman on the show to justify the terror group's apparent "military action" of blowing up a bus full of civilians in Tel Aviv. I use the term "apparent" because Islamic Jihad has also taken responsibility. The Fox News co-anchors grille the Hamas apologist - who continually tried to justify the bombing by claiming that the Israeli military killed civilians.

Let's set this bald-faced lie aside for a moment and assume the spokesman is correct: The Israeli military is butchering Palestinian men, women, and children in their sleep. Now, the Hamas apologist's argument becomes this: the Israelis target civilians so it is acceptable for Hamas and other terrorist organizations to do the same. We can simplify the logic of this argument further:

My neighbor rapes my sister. It is therefore morally justified for me to rape my neighbor's sister in response.

The linkage of my immoral act to a prior immoral act simply obfuscates the fact that neither action can be justified. One could argue that there would be some ancient form of moral justification for lopping off my neighbor's dick with my Fiskar's pruning shears; however, even in the most backward areas of the Islamic world the transgressor is punished directly - not indirectly based on his act. So one who kills another's parents does not have his/her parent's killed in retaliation; one who molests the child of another does not have his/her children molested as punishment.A thief loses his hand in Riyadh- not the goods from his own shop. A murderer in Mecca loses his life, not a loved one. In all cases the criminals are subject to a punishment that does not necessarily mirror the exact crime they have committed.

But this is exactly the kind of moral logic used by Hamas to justify the attacks against Israeli civilians. Contrary to popular wisdom, it is not the punishment of "eye for an eye" - since even ancient leaders recognized that a punishment which mirrored the crime exactly would often leave the transgressor without any punishment whatsoever. To prevent this from happening societies started codifying laws, such as the Code of Hammurabi, that deterred crime by a series of punishments that were not necessarily tied to the nature of a crime. For example, "If any one steal cattle or sheep, or an ass, or a pig or a goat... if they belonged to a freed man of the king he shall pay tenfold; if the thief has nothing with which to pay he shall be put to death. " Note that the thief does not forfeit his own pig or goat to his victim: instead he is fined 10 times the value of the stolen goods or, lacking the resources to pay the fine, loses his life.

But Hamas claims to be an Islamic organization. What does Islam have to say about crime and retaliation?

"In dealing with murder, the Quran definitely discourages capital
punishment (2:179). "The free for the free, the slave for the slave,
and the female for the female" (2:178). Due to human meanness and
injustice, many people cannot even imagine what this Quranic law says.
They refuse to accept the clear injunctions that strict equivalence
must be observed - if a woman kills a man, or a man kills a woman, or
a slave kills a free person, or a free person kills a slave, capital
punishment cannot be applied. The Quran prefers that the murderer
compensate the victim's family. Killing the murderer does not bring
the victim back, nor does the family of the victim benefit from
executing the murderer. The compensation, however, must be sufficient
to be a deterrent for others. In Islam (Submission), the victim and/or
the victim's family are the judges for all crimes; they decide what
the punishment shall be under the supervision of a person who knows
the Quran."

So Islam itself apparently makes a distinction between the nature of a crime and its punishment.

By this logic, Hamas does have the moral basis for attacking Israeli soldiers and politicians. So what is left to justify the attacks on Israeli civilians? Something the Hamas apologist didn't say in his interview on Fox News:

"...what the Zionist entity and its ally America call "innocent civilians" are called in our Brigades and our Palestinian people's lexicon settlers and usurpers of our lands. They will only receive death and displacement and if they wish to save their lives they have to pack up and leave before they regret it."

So in Hamas' view, all Israelis are soldiers and all Hamas members are civilians. By this twisted logic, Hamas is indeed morally justified in its actions. However the Hamas apologist would not concede this point to the exasperated Fox News co-anchors for risk of exposing this lie to the world - bringing to mind a poem by Robert Graves:

And lying in my bed that night
Hungry, tired out with sobs, I found
A stretch of barren years in sight,
Where right is wrong, but strength is right,
Where weak things must creep underground,
And I could not sleep sound.