In this morning’s Weekend Beacon email Vic Matus directs the attention of readers to Andrew Roberts’s “monumental essay comparing Hamas with the Nazis. In many ways, Hamas comes out worse.” However, President Biden is doing his best to complicate Israel’s effort to eliminate Hamas and impose his “two-state” fantasy on the Israelis despite the glaring absence among Palestinian Arabs of a market for peace. Take Hamas — please:
The sheer glee with which Hamas…killed parents in front of their children and of children in front of their parents, was broadcast to the world. Nazi sadism was routine and widespread, but it wasn’t built into their actual operational plans in the way that Hamas’s sadism has been.
The gas chambers were invented in part because the Nazis did not much enjoy the actual process of killing Jews as much as Himmler hoped they might. As Laurence Rees notes of Himmler in 1941, “He had observed two years before the psychological damage that shooting Jews at close range had caused his team of killers and so he had overseen the development of a system of murder via the gas chambers that to an extent distanced from emotional trauma.” No such trauma is evident in Hamas’s teams of killers, who phoned up their parents on October 7 to boast about the number of Jews they had killed.
After invading countries, the Nazis often took hostages to ensure the compliance of the local population with their proclamations. The mayor, businessmen, the popular village priest, and other worthies would be taken hostage and threatened with execution if resistance were offered to their rule. It was brutal and in contravention of all the rules of war, but even the Nazis, foul as they were, did not deliberately take nine-month-old babies and young children, women, and octogenarians hostage, as Hamas has done. Nor did the Nazis use babies in incubators and children in hospital ICU units as human shields.
Roberts’s “monumental essay” is “What makes Hamas worse than Nazis” and it warrants reading in its entirety. Roberts is of course the prominent historian and author of Churchill: Walking With Destiny. Churchill is only one of his several other books covering the World War II era. His new book, written with David Petraeus, is Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare From 1945 to Ukraine. His site is here.
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