Israel\u2019s battle against Hamas might seem limited to the Gaza Strip, but it\u2019s far bigger than that.<\/p>\n
The Hamas massacre inside Israel threatens world peace. The millions marching in support of Hamas\u2019s crimes in New York, London, Paris and Sydney prove that the terrorist group enjoys sympathizers worldwide. Today, the attacks target Israel, but tomorrow any democracy could be targeted.<\/p>\n
Regrettably, much of the world remains ensnared in an illusion we recognize from the early 2000s when Hamas and Islamic Jihad suicide bombers attacked Israeli buses, caf\u00e9s and restaurants.<\/p>\n
As Israel defended itself in Gaza and the West Bank, it repeatedly warned that what was happening here would one day spread. Yet, the Western world ignored these admonitions. It was easier to decide, as people do today, that this was an isolated battle, the result of years of Israel\u2019s supposed mistreatment of the Palestinian people who were simply fighting for independence.<\/p>\n
Then, tragically,\u00a0Israel\u2019s prediction came true again\u00a0<\/a>and again and again. In 2001,\u00a0al Qaeda\u00a0terrorists struck New York and Washington on 9\/11. In 2002, Jemaah Islamiyah\u2019s bombings murdered 202 people in Bali.<\/p>\n Among other assaults,\u00a0Islamic terrorists attacked Madrid commuter trains<\/a>\u00a0in 2004, the London Underground and bus system in 2005, and the Charlie Hebdo offices, a Jewish supermarket, and a music concert in Paris in 2015.<\/p>\n Such democratic denialism is not new. Most citizens in Western democracies are so peace-loving it\u2019s easier to overlook your enemies than confront them\u00a0\u2014\u00a0and it\u2019s easier to assume they are reasonable like you rather than consumed by evil. Throughout the 1930s, for example, most Americans remained isolationist, even as Nazi Germany and totalitarian Japan menaced the world.<\/p>\n Even after President Franklin Roosevelt warned that, “Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock has our American civilization been in such danger as now,” telegrams, letters, and postcards bombarded Congress demanding neutrality. After\u202fGermany invaded Poland in September 1939 North Dakota Senator Gerald P. Nye insisted the European war was not “worthy of the sacrifice of one American mule, much less one American son.”<\/p>\n Then, as now, students and professors wanted American\u2019s head buried deep in the sand. A Harvard sociologist, Pitrim A. Sorokin,\u202fproclaimed in October 1939, “I prefer unjust peace to a long war.” In 1940, only 33% of Princeton freshmen were ready to fight overseas.<\/p>\n In October 1941, two months before the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor plunged America into war, only 17% of Americans\u202foverall, favored a declaration of war.\u202f As a Harvard Crimson editorial explained, “If only blood can wash away the strange quirks in the human mind that breed war… there is still no reason why it must be done with American blood.”<\/p>\n The West, and particularly the U.S., cannot fall into the same trap again. Today we need a clear stance recognizing Hamas\u2019s October 7 massacre as the latest round in the 21st\u202fcentury\u2019s war of good against evil. The values and liberties that the West holds dear must defeat the darkness that comes with Islamic extremism.<\/p>\n