Sympathy With The Devil

Of Moral Midgetry and Useful Idiots

Unfinished Conversations with Friends Pt. 2

In my last piece I wrote about a dinner with industry friends that, at some point, morphed into a conversation about legacy journalism, narrative manipulation, and our vanishing ability to agree on basic facts.

In that same piece, I mentioned a second conversation from that night. One I hadn’t yet confronted. One thornier in subject and darker in tone. One that suggested a soft complicity in the face of evil.

One friend, someone I’ve known well enough to have shared sincere moments with, mentioned a film he was working on. An animated film, he said. “Neutral,” he assured me. “Anti-war.” The subject? An Israeli strike on a hospital in Lebanon.

Then came the line. Always a line. He said, with performative solemnity, “Because you just don’t bomb hospitals.”

To which I replied—perhaps too quickly, but certainly not inaccurately—“You just don’t build military installations under hospitals.”

The mood dropped. His expression flickered—momentarily caught between confusion and offence. Then came a few rounds of back-and-forth. He claimed that hospitals are protected under international law. I countered that Hamas and Hezbollah know this and exploits it precisely for that reason. He muttered something about proportionality. I pointed out that Hamas and Hezbollah intentionally provoke disproportionate responses for media mileage. Then, in a moment he clearly thought profound, my friend offered what might be the most asinine analogy I’ve ever heard in a serious conversation.

He asked—completely devoid of context—“What would you do if you had the man who murdered your family at gunpoint, and he was holding his baby?”

Then, bizarrely, added something about how in jiu jitsu you could execute a leg takedown without hurting the child—an analogy as childish as it was absurd. The kind of tactical fantasy one hears from people who think cops should just “shoot the legs.” As if war was a controlled demonstration. As if Hamas operatives weren’t already holding other people’s babies—their own people’s babies—in front of them like human sandbags. As if this entire scenario weren’t already happening on an industrial scale. As if the dilemma he was proposing was some imagined moral puzzle and not Hamas’ explicit tactical doctrine.

And this, in his mind, was a gotcha. A clever trap. As though Israel’s greatest sin was failing the trolley problem.

What I wanted to say—and didn’t, not then, but should have—was this: every innocent life lost in Gaza lies at the feet of Hamas. Full stop. Every corpse, every ruined building, every child caught in the crossfire—it all begins with them. They butchered families in their beds. They raped, beheaded, and kidnapped—and then hid behind hospitals and classrooms like cowards. And the scenario my friend floated—that asinine moral brain teaser—was just the first of many moments where he drew the moral line wherever it suited him. He didn’t start his outrage with the slaughter of October 7th. He started with the airstrikes that followed. His moral timeline begins only when the Jews shoot back. In his world, the crime isn’t murder—it’s self-defense.

Then came the poisoned olive branch. He reached across the table, placed a gentle hand on my arm, and delivered what he must have believed was a magnanimous statement:

“You’re not going to change my mind, and I’m not going to change yours. And I don’t want to think less of you because of what you’ll say.”

There it was.

Not a rebuttal. Not a challenge. A confession—or perhaps an escape hatch. Maybe he wanted to end the conversation. Maybe he sensed, somewhere beneath the certainty, that his views couldn’t withstand real scrutiny. Whatever the reason, the effect was the same: a white flag dressed as wisdom, preemptively insulated with emotion, condescension, and a subtle threat.

Because let’s be clear: this wasn’t an invitation to “agree to disagree.” It was emotional blackmail.

It wasn’t my ideas he was threatening to think less of—it was me. The person. The friend. Speak, and risk the friendship. Disagree, and you will be demoted. Not your idea—you.

“I don’t want to think less of you.”

How very charitable. Except, of course, that he already had.

I’ve disagreed with this friend for years. On many things. I watched him flail over Brett Kavanaugh, swallow whole the hysterical myth of an insurrectionist coup on January 6th, justify BLM riots, and mask himself and his kids like medieval plague victims well into 2023 when even the WHO had given up the charade. And since October 7th, I’ve been treated to a steady drip of his social media feed—filled with pro-Intifada slogans, martyrdom chic, and a curated highlight reel of moral inversions masquerading as solidarity.

Through it all, I listened. Occasionally I’d push back—gently, respectfully. I’d offer a different view, a counterpoint, a raised eyebrow. But never once did I insult his character. Never once did I take his political gullibility as cause to reassess the man himself. I assumed he meant well. That he was simply wrong.

But I now see that grace is not reciprocal. Apparently, only one of us was participating in a friendship. The other was managing a conditional relationship that expires the moment disagreements intrudes.

The Death Cult You’re Defending

Let’s talk about what exactly my friend is defending. Because despite the sad little disclaimer, despite the “neutral” veneer of his “anti-war” film, he is doing what far too many in our morally illiterate creative class are doing: allying themselves—through ignorance, cowardice, or both—with a death cult.

A literal one. He would recoil at that phrasing, of course. He thinks he’s above it—too cultured, too nuanced. But the effect is the same: moral cover for monsters.

Hamas is not a freedom movement. It is not resistance. It is not "anti-colonialist" or any other fashionable euphemism the university-educated imbeciles have attached to it. It is a fascist, theocratic, misogynistic, homophobic, genocidal organization bankrolled by the, now defenestrated, mullahs of Iran and shielded by the corpse-piles of its own people. Its 1988 founding charter calls explicitly for Israel's destruction—declaring that "Israel will exist and continue to exist until Islam obliterates it." Hamas rapes, tortures, kidnaps, and beheads. It hides behind civilians—storing weapons in hospitals, mosques, and UN schools like some demented Easter egg hunt. It wears civilian clothes after massacring Jews. It disguises its fighters in IDF uniforms. It does all of this proudly, films it for posterity, and then cries foul when Israel dares to respond.

On October 7th, Hamas launched a coordinated massacre from Gaza. They filmed the carnage. One young fighter—recorded—called home to proudly recount that he had killed 10 Jews with his own hands. “Oh my son, God bless you” said the parents.

I’ve seen the footage. The kind that breaks something inside you. I’ve seen the young Asian man—a migrant worker, likely didn’t speak Hebrew—being decapitated with a shovel. Didn’t matter. He was in Israel, and he wasn’t Hamas. So off came his head.

Has my friend seen that video? Or was he too busy posting #StopAsianHate while ignoring the Asians actually being slaughtered?

Because I did see him post that hashtag. Which makes his silence now all the more grotesque. He hasn’t posted a single thing about the Asian workers murdered or taken hostage on October 7th—no outrage for the Thai agricultural workers, the Filipinos, the migrants trapped and executed by Hamas. Nothing.

And here’s what I can’t quite shake: Why this? Why now? Why is this the hill he’s chosen to die on? If he’s so deeply “anti-war,” why no outrage at the war crimes that started this one? Why no film about the hostages? Why no post condemning the torture, the rape, the executions? Why not even a passing word about Hamas—let alone a filmic indictment of it? Not one frame. Not one note of moral ambivalence. Just a steady stream of anti-Israel sentiment, delivered under the banner of neutrality.

And if he really cares so much about the Palestinian cause, why the deafening silence about the treatment of Palestinians outside of Gaza? Where is his film about the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, where nearly 500,000 are segregated, denied citizenship, and kept in generational squalor by their Arab “brothers”? Yet Gaza, for all its corruption and tragedy, had beachfront hotels, malls, even luxury car dealerships. The camps have none of that. Why no outrage at Egypt, which has sealed its border with Gaza? Why is his anger reserved solely for the Jews, while the rest of the Arab world gets a moral pass?

And it’s not just him. To date, there has not been a single major protest organized anywhere in the world against Hamas. Not one global day of rage for the kidnapped, the murdered, or the raped. No marches in London or New York demanding the release of Israeli children or Thai hostages. The supposed moral conscience of the West—the same people who will march for pronouns or statues—goes utterly silent when the perpetrators are brown-ish men with rocket launchers. Apparently, some lives matter more than others. Or more precisely: some deaths are just harder to monetize.

Meanwhile, my friend’s Instagram stayed silent—except to share #FreePalestine images.

But I know a death cult when I see one.

Because I grew up around them.

Not in theory. In cartel country. Where narcos hang bodies from bridges, decapitate journalists on camera, and burn down rehab clinics to send a message. Where evil isn’t a philosophical category—it’s atmospheric. You learn, early and viscerally, that people who kill with joy aren’t rebels. They aren’t misunderstood. They aren’t fighting for liberation.

They are monsters.

The islamist even say it out loud: “We Love Death Like Our Enemies Love Life” It’s not a metaphor. It’s a mission statement. The same ghoulish theology animates the cartels I grew up around—who venerate Santa Muerte, the skeletal saint of death, with altars and offerings like she’s a holy assassin. Hamas has its own version: martyrs, blood feuds, and a paradise promised not through mercy, but murder. These aren’t just violent organizations. They are death cults—ideologies built around the glorification of killing and the spiritual exaltation of corpses.

And it’s not just Hamas. According to multiple polls—including one by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research—support for Hamas among Gazans surged after October 7th. This isn’t fringe. It’s the mainstream. When a society cheers for mass rape and murder like sporting events, the problem isn’t just the leadership. It’s the culture that sustains them.

Hamas is a murderous bully—thriving on martyrdom, manufacturing funerals, hiding weapons in nurseries, and filming rape tapes before crying victim when someone fights back.

This isn’t new. Hamas didn’t invent this pathology. Their ideology is a direct descendant of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem—who openly aligned with Hitler, broadcast Nazi propaganda from Berlin, and called for the extermination of Jews across the Arab world helping pipe the poison of Jew-hatred directly into the bloodstream of Middle Eastern politics.

And if you still think this is just about land or sovereignty or some undergraduate's idea of anti-colonialism, watch the Gaza kindergarten graduation video—children in fatigues re-enacting IDF kidnappings, clutching fake rifles while teachers grin like proud parents at a school play. This is not education. This is a generation deliberately groomed to hate, to kill, and to die. The West calls it trauma. Hamas calls it education.

Graffiti outside a Canadian post office. The same slogans Hamas chants are now spray-painted in Duncan, British Columbia.

The Cowardice of Comfort

That same night, as we sat there, circling the same exhausted arguments—his tone calm, his face full of studied concern—two Israeli Embassy staffers were being gunned down just a few hundred miles south, outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.

Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim. A young couple. Diplomats. Peace advocates. Shot at close range after attending a reception. Their alleged killer, Elias Rodriguez, screamed “Free Palestine!” as he was being arrested.

The timing couldn’t have been more revealing. There he was—running cover for neo-nazis—while Jews were being hunted in the capital of the free world by someone parroting the same slogans my friend posts between “solidarity” virtue signals.

Some have already said what’s becoming harder to deny: that “Free Palestine!” has become the new “Heil Hitler!” Not in theory. In practice. It’s the slogan screamed while Jews are stabbed, shot, spat on, and beaten. The language may be modern. The hatred is not.

Drawing the Moral Line Wherever It’s Convenient

My friend, like so many others, draws the moral line not where principle demands—but where convenience permits.

He has no objection to Hezbollah’s open strategy of embedding themselves among civilians. No comment on Hamas launching rockets from schoolyards and hiding command centres under maternity wards. No outrage about Palestinians dancing through the streets on October 7th, joining in the invasion like it was a carnival, looting homes, dragging corpses.

And he certainly doesn’t mention how Hamas routinely violates Article 44 of the Geneva Convention by dressing its fighters in civilian clothing—making it nearly impossible to distinguish combatants from non-combatants. This isn’t just a wartime tactic—it’s a deliberate strategy to inflate civilian casualties, weaponize international sympathy, and cloud the moral waters just enough for people like him to posture as righteous while siding with evil. Not because they’re confused—because they’ve already decided who the villain is, and they’re too cowardly to reconsider.

But he weeps for a bombed hospitals. Hospitals used as cover. Buildings Israel warns repeatedly before striking.

He draws the moral line around the blast radius—but never at the hand that pulled the trigger that set it all off.

And when I tried to point this out, he offered the world’s most asinine analogy: “Well, what if Iran bombed an IDF building Tel Aviv?”

On the surface, it sounds like a challenge. In reality, it’s moral sleight of hand. The analogy only works if you erase motive, context, and legitimacy. It equates a democratic state targeting rockets deliberately hidden beneath incubators in self-defence—notwithstanding that such a site would be a legitimate military target under international law—with a theocratic regime launching missiles at civilians for ideological reasons. It assumes symmetry where there is none. It’s the ethical equivalent of accusing a rape victim of violence because she fought back.

This is not moral clarity. It’s philosophical laziness. A kind of ethical cosplay where intention doesn’t matter, legality doesn’t matter, history doesn’t matter—only the optics of suffering. It’s a worldview that reduces war to aesthetics, and justice to whoever looks sadder in the headline photo.

And worst of all, it makes moral seriousness impossible. Because if every act of violence is treated the same, then self-defence itself becomes aggression the moment it’s effective.

This is not maturity. It’s moral midgetry. A posture dressed up as principle. A way to avoid judgment while feeling virtuous. Because for people like my friend, proportionality isn’t about ethics—it’s about optics. It’s not a framework for justice. It’s a filter for Instagram.

An Inconvenient Truth

Let’s run a few numbers.

When you control for Hamas deliberately inflating civilian death tolls (a trick they perfected by reclassifying combatants, dressing them in civilian clothes, and reporting stats hours after an airstrike), the combatant-to-civilian kill ratio in Gaza is at least similar to Fallujah, Mosul, Aleppo and WWII.

But facts don’t matter in this war. Because this isn’t just a military war. It’s a propaganda war—fought with slogans, selfies, and invented histories.

And the foundational lie—the one rarely questioned—is this:

That “Palestinians” are an ancient, distinct people with a historic claim to statehood.

Bullshit.

The term “Palestinian,” as applied to Arabs only, was invented in the 1960s—conjured out of thin air by Yasser Arafat, a KGB backed Egyptian. Before that, it referred to Jews, Arabs, Christians—anyone living in the region. The Palestinian Liberation Organization never wanted a two-state solution. It wanted one state—without Jews. That hasn’t changed. The hatred hasn’t changed.

And further back? The name “Palestine” itself was a Roman act of erasure. After crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 AD, the Romans renamed Judea “Provincia Syria Palaestina”—not to honor a native population, but to humiliate the Jews by invoking their ancient enemies, the Philistines.

My friend has decided—whether consciously or not—that Israel is the villain. Not because of evidence. Not because of history. But because in the progressive script, Jews with tanks are scarier than jihadis with a GoPro.

The Instagram Intifada And The Hamasshole Brigade

You might say my friend is just “misinformed.” Lied to by the usual suspects—legacy media, Instagram reels, NGO press offices. Maybe. But ignorance doesn’t explain it. Not anymore.

It’s not that he doesn’t know better. It’s that he doesn’t want to. Because knowing might force him to rethink things. To admit the world isn’t cleanly divided into clean categories of oppressed and oppressor. That the brown-skinned man with the Kalashnikov might not be the moral superior of the gay Israeli soldier he just butchered. That Hamas isn’t fighting for justice—but for something closer to National Socialism.

He might have to face the fact that on October 7th, Palestinian civilians—not militants, not terrorists, not fighters, but ordinary people—joined in the slaughter. Crossed the border. Joined the pogrom. Dragged bodies. Spat on corpses. Filmed it. Posted it. Laughed. Looted.

And in the days that followed, not a single Palestinian civilian was reported to have helped a hostage. Not one. Quite the opposite: some hostages were hidden in private homes—not to shield them from danger, but to prolong their torment. Many were kept in squalor, starved, beaten, and terrorized—children included. Even in Nazi Germany—at the height of history’s darkest evil—there were ordinary civilians who risked their lives to hide Jews in their attics and cellars. In Gaza, they didn’t hide them. They imprison them.

My friend, with his curated Instagram feed of #Resist images, has found himself emotionally aligned with a coalition of Islamofascists and actual neonazis. That’s not a rhetorical flourish. That’s the political reality of today’s “Free Palestine” rallies—from Toronto to London to Berlin—where chants of “Gas the Jews” now share the stage with keffiyeh-draped college girls holding Starbucks cups. In other words, he’s joined the Hamasshole Brigade—a unit of emotionally fragile Westerners who mistake slogans for substance and jihadists for freedom fighters.

A post by “Unity of Fields,” a group behind pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia. This is what ‘solidarity’ looks like in the age of Instagram empathy. (h/t Rueben Salsa)

The Media As Useful Idiots

Of course, my friend’s view isn’t entirely self-generated. He’s been spoon-fed by the BBC and its American cousins at CNN and The New York Times—institutions that have traded journalism for narrative curation, and curiosity for ideological conformity.

These aren’t newsrooms anymore. They’re echo chambers posing as journalism. They don’t report. They perform. They don’t verify. They amplify—especially if the source is a genocidal terror group with a halfway-decent press kit.

Take the infamous “14,000 starving babies” claim. A vague UN comment about long-term malnutrition was twisted—within hours—into an apocalyptic blood libel: 14,000 babies would die in 48 hours. No sourcing. No caveats. Just a headline tailor-made for moral panic.

It was a lie. Eventually, both the UN and BBC walked it back. But by then, it had done its job: flood social media, stir anger, smear Israel. The retraction, as always, came too late.

Even the White House called it out. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt slammed the BBC for “taking Hamas at their word as total truth.” She was right.

This isn’t journalism. It’s narrative laundering—emotional manipulation sold as humanitarian concern.

Then came the Al-Ahli Hospital and Gaza aid station stories. First, the media parroted Hamas’s claim that an Israeli airstrike had bombed a hospital, killing hundreds. In reality, it was a Hamas rocket misfire. Months later, they reported that the IDF fired on civilians at an aid station. But Israeli footage told a different story: masked gunmen—likely Hamas—firing on the crowd. Again, the lies went viral. The truth came limping after.

Zach Goldberg—one of the few researchers still quantifying our collective psychosis—ran the numbers. Mentions of “Israel” and “genocide” in The New York Times soared to nine times the level during Rwanda and nearly six times higher than Darfur. The Guardian showed similar spikes. Not because the slaughter is worse—because the narrative is more useful. This is concept creep—when serious moral language gets whored out for partisan ends. When “genocide” no longer means a calculated campaign of ethnic extermination, but “who we’ve decided to hate this week.”

And still, my friend watches this slop. Quotes it. Makes films based on it. Calls it neutral.

But neutrality in the face of evil is not virtue. It is complicity.

You don’t have to love the Israeli government. You don’t have to agree with every military strike. But if, after everything, you find yourself emotionally aligned with men who behead civilians, use their own babies as shields, indoctrinate children to kill, and film it for fun—then the problem is not your politics. The problem is your soul.

Call Evil by Its Name

This isn’t about a hospital in Lebanon or Gaza. It’s not about nuance, or tone, or feelings, or any other therapeutic nonsense. It’s about whether we can still recognize evil when it presents itself plainly—armed, gloating, and dragging the corpses of Jews behind it like trophies.

October 7th wasn’t just an attack on Israel. It was an attack on one of the twin pillars of Western civilization. The West was built atop two hills: Athens and Jerusalem. One gave us reason, the other gave us conscience. And Hamas struck at the heart of the latter.

It wasn’t just the murder of Jews. It was the desecration of everything Israel represents to the West: law over barbarism, memory over myth, moral clarity over nihilism. The covenant, the commandment, the dignity of the individual—all of it was mocked, defiled, and streamed in high definition.

And yet, my friend flinches not at the atrocity, but at the response. Not at the death cult, but at the nation fighting it.

Because what’s being tested now isn’t just Israel’s will to survive. It’s the West’s will to mean what it says.

If we can’t defend the only liberal democracy in the Middle East—our outpost of civilization in a region of blood feuds and theocratic tyranny—then we’re not defending liberal democracy at all.

And when the next death cult comes—and it will—it won’t matter how many films we’ve animated. It won’t matter how sensitive we felt. All that will matter is whether we had the spine to name evil while we still could.