Am I different from them?

The haunting question I have been asking myself while watching the news is this one: how do I know that I am different from them?  Can I be so sure?

When I see video and the opinions expressed from Palestinians and Hamas-supporters overseas and on our campuses, I feel that the difference is stark.  There is no conceivable way that I could ever support Hamas.  Yet I wonder how I know this with such certainty.  Had I grown up in a radically different environment, would I still hold the views that I have?  Or would it be possible that, despite how manifestly depraved those views seem to me now, I could have ended up with them?

The pro-Hamas worldview is a distinctly disturbed view.  I am not the first to note how it celebrates death like a cult, how civilians are looked at as human shields.  If civilians die, all the better — that simply helps the propaganda.  A child could be a bomb.  Put your military base under a hospital.  Chant genocidal slogans.

This is your worldview.  You hate Jews, and you hate the West, and you look at your friends as tools that can be sacrificed to attack your enemies.

This disturbed view is not just a small radical minority opinion among Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank.  A full 72% of Palestinians in there support the October 7 attack, according to a report from December 13 of last year.  This attack is the single most radical step taken by Hamas in a long history of radical steps.  One could imagine a person being disturbed enough to support Hamas but not quite disturbed enough to support that brutal attack.  Yet many Palestinians and their supporters seem to buy the whole horrible package.

On our college campuses, we see a major current of outright pro-Hamas support.  Again, there is much daylight between being sympathetic to Palestinian suffering (which is caused mostly by Hamas, of course) and outright support for Hamas.  Yet many in our college community choose to go all in.  Further, the fact that colleges are a hotbed of Hamas support undercuts any argument that poverty or a lack of educational opportunity is the cause of this disturbed thinking.  One can be distinctly disturbed with a backpack and a latte.

Yet we must acknowledge that we are talking about a whole society.  They are all seemingly infected with this deplorable way of thinking.  But some people in that society must also be partly decent and do decent things — good with the kids, good with the spouse.  They might work.  They might pay bills.  They might be good neighbors and friends.  They might be involved in civic organizations.  They might be involved in their child’s soccer team. Likewise, the students on campus, yelling “river to the sea,” might be good kids to their parents and good brothers or sisters.

Think about that.  Stew on it real hard.  A man could support a death cult but otherwise be an all-around pretty darn good guy.

Think of it this way: what if you or I grew up in Gaza?  Are we constructed so differently that we would be resistant?  Almost everyone in that region has a positive view of Hamas and intifada.  How sure are we that we would be outliers?  If we would become outliers, dissidents, then why so?  Are we different by nature?  Are our genetics different?  Can we discount nurture so easily?  The people in the region are not stupid.  We can’t assume we could just reason right and wrong so easily.

The strong likelihood that some of the people that live there are good family men and women yet have this incredibly evil side makes wonder how easy it is to recognize evil when it is in you.  If we all grew up there, would we all resist?

Yet I cannot accept this way of thinking, because it implies that there is no way to know what is good and what is evil.  I know with certainty that Hamas and pro-Hamas sentiment are evil, but I don’t know how I know it.  The evil couldn’t be clearer.  Yet millions of people in a different culture, otherwise as good and as smart as me, see the opposite.  I cannot accept that nurture is the only difference and that we are all gullible sheeple.

There are no easy answers to this conundrum.   But I think the answer may lie in the values that undergird our society.  These values keep us centered because they come from outside us.  Therefore, they don’t turn and twist and blow around with us.  If we take them earnestly, they aren’t subject to corruption.

Values that begin within us, from our own reason, turn with us and are easily corruptible.  It is therefore altogether predictable that the college environment, where Jewish and Christian ideas are least valued, is the most susceptible to this corruption of thinking.  With no lifeline from the outside, right and wrong break free of their moorings. 

All humans are subject to self-deception, I believe.  That points to the importance of turning to an outside source.  Then we can look with a clearer eye at events, and when we speak the truth, we can do so with a full heart and as much confidence as the human condition allows.

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