Ben Shapiro


Let’s talk about how all this happened.


It happened because we in the West don’t understand our enemies. They know that and they exploit that.


In 2004, President George W. Bush gave an address at the United Nations in which he said one of the most naive things any president has ever said: “When it comes to the desire for liberty and justice, there is no clash of civilizations. People everywhere are capable of freedom and worthy of freedom. The desire for freedom resides in every human heart.”


That was idiocy then and it’s idiocy now. It is simply not true. People have many different priorities. For a lot of people, their priority is not Western notions of freedom; it’s adherence to fundamentalist interpretation of Koranic law.


For many, their priority isn’t economic development; it’s belief in the murder of Jews across the world. But this peculiar Western belief system — that everyone wants freedom — has led the West down two separate and equally stupid paths.


Path number one, which we saw over the course of the last 25 years, was nation-building.


That’s what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq. The West fooled itself into believing that tribal peoples with different priorities really, _really_ wanted iPhones and sexual liberation, and that if we offered those things, they would welcome us with open arms, instead of pursuing a realistic foreign policy designed to protect America’s interests.


We launched into a utopian world of our own making, and we failed.


Yet we continue to pursue that path today. We continue to act as though it is Israel’s job to build up the infrastructure in Gaza or provide them water and power, even while Hamas murders babies in their cribs and puts its own civilians in harm’s way. That’s ridiculous and it’s going to fail.


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Path number two was the path of willful ignorance: If we all have the same priorities, we can negotiate with anyone and everyone. Everyone is reasonable. Everyone wants the same thing, even if circumstances get a little out of hand from time to time.


Even if a couple of weeks a year rockets fly from Gaza into Tel Aviv, that’s just the frustration of reasonable people with reasonable priorities. It’s just all a “cycle of violence.”


This path leads to failure and mass death and lulls the West, including Israel, into a false sense of security.


Senior Hamas official Ali Baraka explained, in detail on Russian television, the lie that so many Americans fell for.


He said on Russia Today TV that in the past couple of years, Hamas had adopted a rational approach, did not enter into any war, and did not join the Islamic Jihad in its recent battle. But all of this was Hamas’ strategy in preparing for attack.


“Of course, we made them think that Hamas was busy with governing Gaza, and that it wanted to focus on the 2.5 million Palestinians \[in Gaza\] and has abandoned the resistance altogether. All the while under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack,” he said.


Right from the outset, he says it was a lie. They never cared about the 2.5 million Palestinians in Gaza. This is the game they play: your belief that they care. So when Israel strikes at Hamas’ targets and hits civilians that Hamas is deliberately putting in the way, then it’s Israel’s fault. After all, what kind of human beings wouldn’t care if their own babies are getting killed?


Israel lulled itself into a sense of complacency about this. Sure, Hamas launched a few rockets every so often, mostly just to prove to their own people they were still a terrorist group. But in reality, they want to be a normal governing power.


Every bit of money that flowed into Gaza over the course of the last 20 years was used by Hamas for purposes of murdering Jews. They say they don’t care about their own people; their highest aspiration is death.


They assume that you are sophisticated, that _you_ know better than _they_ do what they are thinking and saying. They say it right to your face. They say it directly to your face. And then you think, “No, no, it can’t be. It must be the Israelis’ fault somehow."


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Ep. 1827 - How Hamas Fooled The World

A senior Hamas official explains just how the terror group pulled off one of the worst terror attacks in history; the Israelis form a unity government to wipe Hamas from the map; and the legacy media begin to blame Israel for the massacre.


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Baraka said, “I hear the Israelis are known to love life. We, on the other hand, sacrifice ourselves. We consider our dead to be martyrs. The thing any Palestinian desires most is to be martyred for the sake of Allah, defending his land.”


That’s the line for all of the radical Islamic fundamentalist world: Islamic Jihad. Hezbollah. Hamas. Iran.


In traditional Western thought, the way you care about your kids is not by killing them. And the way you care about your citizens is not by putting them directly in the line of an airstrike so you can sit underground waiting to kill Jews.


But they don’t think like we do. That’s the whole point. And they know you won’t believe them. They can say it directly to their own people. They can say it clearly on TV over and over.


And you still won’t believe them.


That’s how stupid they think you are.


The West is so stupid that we believe, in the end, this can be negotiated with.


You won’t believe what they say because it’ll boggle your mind. But you _will_ believe that the _Jews_ are the bad guys. That’s what they’re counting on, that you will believe the Jews are the bad guys, even after the Jews get slaughtered in their beds.


None of this conversation was happening after 9/11. You know what happens after you kill 3,000 Americans? You know what happens? We flatten you.


But when Israel has its borders permeated by terrorists who murder 1,300 Jews — the equivalent of roughly 47,000 Americans — people say, “Those Jews, man, you know, they really have to be a little more careful, those Jews.”


What is going to take place is a bunch of people who express tremendous sympathy for the 1,300 dead Jews in Israel. They’re going to express sympathy for the parents of the burned babies. They’re going to express sympathy for the husbands of the raped wives and the kidnapped. They’re going to express sympathy for that.


And then the entire narrative is going to shift because Israel is going to do what it has to do in order to stop Hamas from ever being a threat to its citizenry again, as any normal nation would.


**Ben Shapiro**

Editor Emeritus,

The Daily Wire

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