Over the course of the last few weeks, Hamas militants clad in full terrorist regalia, have paraded Israeli citizens through crumbled streets filled with angry Gazans chanting for their deaths.
These Israeli hostages - pale, emaciated, starved, and scared - have been reluctantly returned to their families as part of a temporary, no doubt tenuous, ceasefire deal.
If we lived in a sane world, led by men with properly calibrated moral compasses, that world would have been outraged by what it saw:
It's been nearly 500 days of what amounts to a second Holocaust of Jewish citizens executed by a defiant anti-Semitic terror regime. It's been perpetrated right under the noses - and sometimes, shockingly, horrifyingly, with the applause and solidarity - of the civilized world. The images of the released hostages aren't identical, but they are eerily similar to the pictures of liberated survivors of Auschwitz. And yet the world sits oddly quiet, speaking bizarrely about "outrages on both sides" and the supreme need for Israel to not overreact.
Gone are the thunderous cries of "never again," replaced with the compromising and conditional acquiescence, "peace at any price." It's grotesque how few world leaders seem incensed by what has been done (and is still being done, given that more hostages remain unreleased). To be clear, those apathetic voices included the United States government up until the inauguration of the second Trump administration. Finally, the current president seems willing to say what others have not and will not:
At some point we're going to lose our patience [with the Palestinians] — when I see that scene that I saw today with [hostages] coming out of helicopters and airplanes that are emaciated, that look like they haven't had a meal in a month — there's no reason for that, and I don't know how much longer we can take… They look like they've aged 25 years. They literally look like the old pictures of Holocaust survivors.
That's moral clarity that is sorely needed right now. What has been done is a violation of the Geneva Convention, the rules of war, and the common decency of humanity itself. That so many geo-political thought leaders have been unable to see and condemn it is both frightening and appalling. Thank God Donald Trump is doing what they have not done.
I have little doubt that the title of this article alone will cause progressives (and particularly those who call themselves progressive Christians) to lose all control of their bodily functions. Before reading a word of it, they will clamor to comment sections and harpoon the premise with rants about Trump's multiple felonies, his multiple marriages, his philandering, his adultery, his coarseness, and his overall lack of Christlikeness.
Many who don't know me will conclude from the headline that I am a MAGA fanboy willing to give Trump a pass on all those evil things because he agrees with my politics.
Simultaneously, many who do know me, who have read my work and know that I have persistently encouraged Christians to distance themselves from Trump for the last 8 years, will think that I've finally given myself over and gone full MAGA.
And all of it will miss the point.
It's not that I believe Donald Trump adheres to some strict standard of Christian morality, or even that he regularly exhibits a thoughtful submission to the moral law of God that is binding on all men.
But in an era of relative, compromising morality that has intoxicated humanity and numbed our ability to see the distinct lines between good and evil, right and wrong, Trump's simplistic worldview becomes a breath of fresh air.
Following the October 7th attacks in Israel, where the supposedly civilized world was subjected to the caveman-esque barbarism of Iran-financed, Hamas-led Palestinian terror, it seemed likely that rational men would be able to unite in offering a full-throated condemnation of the horror. Instead, it was equivocation, prevarication, and ambiguity. Even the United States, under the leadership of the Biden administration, participated in the spineless charade.
If those days are over, if the United States has a leader willing to indict evil rather than coddle it, count me as one who will see that as reason to rejoice.
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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Not the Bee or any of its affiliates.
