The return of fascism

The fate of the Bibas family confirms what we already knew; that Hamas is a uniquely evil force in the world.

Given the fallen state of humankind, how do we recognise genuine evil when it appears? I have never believed in a Disneyfied world of Heroes and Villains, where good people do good things and bad people do bad things. ‘If only it were all so simple!’ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes in The Gulag Archipelago. ‘If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.’

Yet when we see the footage of Palestinians cheering while the coffins of members of the Bibas family were handed over by Hamas terrorists, it is difficult not to feel that we are facing evil in its most unadulterated form. Autopsies have revealed that Ariel Bibas was 4 and Kfir Bibas just 10 months old when they were murdered by Hamas. The body of the journalist Oded Lifshitz was also handed over, along with another which Hamas claimed that that of Ariel and Kfir’s mother Shiri. Israel has confirmed that these remains are as yet unidentified, and Shiri’s fate is still uncertain.

Ariel and Kfir Bibas

There is something so wretched about the spectacle of human beings celebrating the deaths of others. It is a repudiation of humanity itself, the negation of that empathy and compassion that elevates us above the animal kingdom. We know that many of those celebrating will have lost loved ones in the most brutal way, and that the joy they now take is partly a manifestation of vengeance. But this does not make it any less painful to witness.

I recall seeing an interview with a man who had lost members of his family in an IRA bomb attack on the Protestant Shankill Road in Belfast. He said that, at the time, many of the local residents wanted bloody revenge. They would, he said, have that day been delighted to see innocent Catholics killed in retaliation, whether they had supported the IRA or not. It struck me at the time that the emotion was reprehensible but entirely understandable. When seized by an overwhelming sense of grief and injustice, we lose all capacity for reason.

Everyone understands the horrors that many Gazans have endured in this war. Hamas, we can be certain, cares little for their plight. It delights in the deaths of its own citizens because it believes that the greater the carnage the better their cause is served. Yet there is another aspect to the grotesque displays orchestrated by Hamas this week. This is not simply an expression of vengeance for past injustices, misdirected towards the innocent Bibas family. It is the outcome of a grim ideology that has been encapsulated by Hamas militants who have claimed that ‘we love death more than you love life’.

This ideology is a fanatically religious version of fascism. It has no regard whatsoever for the sanctity of human life. It despises Jews and wishes to see them eliminated from the world. It rewards the basest instincts of which humankind is capable, revelling in psychopathy, cruelty and hatred. It is embodied in the extremist Islamist mania shared by Isis, Al-Qaeda and Hamas. Such zealots rejoice in murder for its own sake. This is a death-cult. This is philistinism. This is the wholesale renunciation of what it means to be a human being.

All people are susceptible to the evils of ideology. Many of those who committed atrocities under the Khmer Rouge or Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany were not born evil. Hamas is just another example of what happens when a ruthless ideology prevails over the human soul. The day after Hamas committed its atrocity on 7 October 2023, British citizens were filmed celebrating on the streets on London, openly supporting a terrorist group whose charter explicitly calls for the extermination of Jews and blames them for both world wars and the Russian and French revolutions. Jubilant Hamas supporters on the streets of Sydney cried out ‘Fuck the Jews’, and a banner in New York City declared ‘Long live 7 October’. In such instances, we can be sure that the poison of ideology has taken hold.

All human life is sacred, but the murder of children crosses a particular threshold that few of us can comprehend. The turning point in Shakespeare’s Richard III is when the king orders the execution of the princes in the tower. Up until this moment, Richard’s mania has been pantomimic, often funny, even when at its most vicious and deranged. Once the children are murdered, the tone of the drama shifts. Nobody is laughing anymore.

Shakespeare knew what he was doing. The innocence of children means nothing to the deranged ideologue. When we have seen activists in the west tearing down posters of Ariel and Kfir on university campuses and elsewhere, we have sensed that genuine evil that can take hold of any human being. These are the very people who have cried ‘fascist’ at every opportunity. For them, it is nothing more than a catch-all smear to deride and demonise their political opponents, and yet they are blind to the genuine fascism that has re-emerged in recent years through the crazed antisemitism of Hamas and its cheerleaders.

The fate of the Bibas family is a tragedy that will linger in our memories. This callous disregard for human life has confirmed, if any confirmation were needed, that the ideology that prevails under the tyranny of Hamas must be defeated. For the sake of Israelis and Gazans alike, it needs to be driven out of the world. We may not know how the crisis in the Middle East can possibly be resolved, but we should all be able to acknowledge the face of evil when we see it.

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