TOUCH NOT THE APPLE OF GOD’S EYE

By Akin Ojumu

In the early hours of Saturday, October 7, 2023, waves of Hamas terrorists flooded southern Israel like a hurricane. They came by land on trucks and motorcycles, by air on motorized paragliders, and by sea on motorboats and fishing boats. As the ground forces sweep through the Israeli kibbutz, an avalanche of rockets rained down from Gaza wreaking unimaginable devastation. 

By the time the terrorists were done, more than 1,000 civilians had been slaughtered and entire families slain. The murderers butchered parents as they used their bodies to try to shield their children. Babies were snatched from mothers’ arms and beheaded in front of their parents. Hundreds of young people were brutally massacred at a musical festival to celebrate peace. Abducted women were assaulted, raped, and paraded as trophies.

President Biden aptly captured the sheer brutality and inhumanity of it all in his speech addressing the attack: 

“Infants in their mothers’ arms, grandparents in wheelchairs, Holocaust survivors abducted and held hostage – hostages whom Hamas has now threatened to execute in violation of every code of human morality.”

Given the scale and magnitude of the gruesome attack, you’d think the entire civilized world would be shocked. Think again. Instead of being stunned upon hearing the news of the atrocity, a vast number of people nonchalantly shrugged their shoulders in apathy. Who cares that a few more Jews got slaughtered in cold blood, their aloof reactions seem to suggest.

Then there are the learned ignoramuses who wrap up their intellectual shallowness in the blood-soaked flag of whataboutism. Shamelessly, these buffoons reveal their moral hollowness when they deflect criticism of such a heinous act by raising corresponding criticisms of the other side.

One such group of educated morons is a coalition of highly intelligent Harvard students who, with zero sense of self-awareness, blamed the victims of terrorism for getting victimized by terrorists. In a statement released in solidarity with Hamas, the uninformed buffoons wrote:

“We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence...”

Gosh! The asininity is mind-boggling.

The idiotic sentiment expressed by the Harvard students in their pro-Hamas statement is a confirmation that Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Theory of Stupidity” was right on point after all. There are, indeed, human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid. Even though these knuckle-headed Harvard students may be sharp as tack, they are alarmingly stupid.

Let me be crystal clear. Placidity is complicity, silence is connivance. To not speak up in the face of a heinous criminal act is to become an accessory after-the-fact to the crime. Those who fail to condemn terrorists who behead children, rape girls, and slaughter the elderly are themselves guilty of committing those very abhorrent deeds.

There cannot be a moral equivalence between self-defense and senseless savagery. Nothing justifies the mass murder of innocent civilians attending a music festival. No one with a shred of morality in them will rationalize the violent abduction of children, women, and elderly from their homes and their cruel humiliation on the streets in a victory parade. It takes someone with a hole in their soul to celebrate the unadulterated evil committed by monsters who have no value for human lives.

Your sense of morality must be grossly warped if you thought there’s anything justifiable in a sheer act of barbarity. One must question the god you serve if you offer support for murderers. To even suggest there’s anything defensible in the actions of ruthless thugs who are committed to violence shows how little you understand the Word of God.

Predictably, there are many so-called Christians twisting themselves into pretzels trying to excuse the massacre of Jews in their homes by Hamas. Irrespective of the religious title in front of your name, you can’t be a Christian and support terrorists who massacre innocent civilians whose only offense is being Jewish. 

Regardless of how one feels about the interminable Israeli-Palestinian conflict, no adult in their right mind will think it’s okay to cheer the beheading of babies, raping of girls and women, slaughtering of the elderly, and the butchering of innocent people attending a music festival. It's an abject moral degeneracy to be unable to draw a clear distinction between the hostility between Jews and Palestinians and a horrific terrorist attack on innocent civilians as they went about their normal lives.

“But the LORD’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage. “He found him in a desert land, and in the howling waste of the wilderness; he encircled him, he cared for him, he kept him as the apple of his eye.” (Deuteronomy 32:9-10).

Get this into your thick skull. Israel is the apple of God’s eye. It’s foolhardy to poke your finger in the apple of God’s eye. Those who applaud the enemies of God’s chosen people will soon fall into the hand of an angry God.