The invincibly ignorant

(Editor’s note: There is much to be said about local issues — the wetlands saga in Manatee County; the passing of Bob Simmons, one of Longboat Key’s longtime community-minded stalwarts; Sarasota’s vacation rental ordinance; affordable housing; cutting Fruitville Road to two lanes downtown.

But for now, these issues pale in importance to what we are all witnessing abroad. They can wait.)

As predicted last week, the demonic, inhumane terrorists — Hamas, Hezbollah and Iranian leadership — and their propaganda machinery successfully mobilized their media sympathizers and the ignorant, brainwashed masses and accomplished much of what they wanted: to make Israel the bad guy, the oppressor and the murderer.

And it took less than a week!

For those of you who know the history of the Jews, starting with the Israelites’ enslavement in Egypt (1300s B.C.) and up to now, you know you cannot find anywhere in the world archives where the Jews and Israelites were the evil, barbaric  murderers, torturers, occupiers and oppressors. It has always been the other way around.

And so it was stomach-turning — the muscles of your stomach tightening and a feeling almost of nausea — to watch the worldwide demonstrations on television and to hear the bile spewing from pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel Americans.

The physical, touchable, truthful evidence didn’t matter. Witnesses describing the Hamas militants’ savage slaughtering; the beheaded babies, butchered elderly; a dead mother and her cut umbilical cord of her unborn baby. The militants carried booklets instructing them how to kill and to kill as many Israelis as they could in their attacks.

It goes further. Even though most of the pro-Palestinian philistines would never see or believe it, for years there have been verified reports of Hamas taking millions and billions of dollars of foreign aid designated for food, water and other social necessities and using that money instead to manufacture of  weapons. They use hospitals and schools as shields for terrorism.

Even with all of this prima facie truth, it is disgusting, sickening and so sad for the United States to watch the hordes of indoctrinated American college kids and other imbecilic sheep siding with the terrorists.

Everywhere you turn, it’s incomprehensible. In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, columnist Allysia Finley quoted Starbucks union leaders: “The apartheid state of Israel is continuing to break international law and wage horrific crimes against humanity.” One of them referred to Israel’s retaliation as “ethnic cleansing” of Gazans. 

Apartheid? Crimes against humanity? Ethnic cleansing? Astonishingly, these people are serious.

They bring to mind the term “invincibly ignorant.” No matter the truth, no matter the evidence, they are impenetrable. Invincibly ignorant. 

And they are cowards. 

Surely you have seen that while they chant death to Israel, they hide their faces behind Fauci-like masks. 

All of this, sadly, is a historic low in America.

But we cannot despair. We must stay Churchillian: “Never give in.”

Fortunately, there are people of courage. Take Barbara and Ryan Ackerman, here locally in Sarasota and Longboat Key. It took great courage for them to stand up with unequivocal force and publish their full-page ad in the Observer — reproduced above: “We Stand with Israel.” 

They did not wear masks. They published their faces above the ad. 

Barbara and Ryan: The Observer Media Group stands with you. We Stand with Israel.

And last week, there was Ben Sasse, president of the University of Florida. Unlike the spineless, mealy melonheads that occupy so many of the presidencies of our universities, Sasse was one of the few — perhaps the only one of which we are aware — who condemned Hamas. 

He did it at a vigil on campus and in a letter to UF’s Jewish alumni and students. UF has 9,000 Jewish students — the largest number of Jewish students among all U.S. public universities. 

One excerpt: “I will not tiptoe around this simple fact: What Hamas did is evil, and there is no defense for terrorism. This shouldn’t be hard. Sadly, too many people in elite academia have been so weakened by their moral confusion that, when they see videos of raped women, hear of a beheaded baby or learn of a grandmother murdered in her home, the first reaction of some is to try ‘to provide context’ and try to blame the raped women, beheaded baby or the murdered grandmother. In other grotesque cases, they express simple support for the terrorists.

“This thinking isn’t just wrong, it’s sickening. It’s dehumanizing. It is beneath people called to educate our next generation of Americans.”

And therein is the root of the nation’s “moral confusion,” or rather immoral indoctrination — our universities and public schools. 

The baby boomer generation has allowed our Judeo-Christian foundation to wither and snuff out what should be obvious to the delusional pro-Palestinian marchers, but isn’t: What they cannot see and have not learned is the history of the world has shown that free people, entrepreneurial capitalism, families and the rules God gave to Moses are the essential ingredients to happiness, prosperity and human dignity.

That formula is seen in vivid contrast where this war for humanity is being waged. For the past 40 years, Israel has flourished with prosperity, economically and socially, because of its capitalistic economy, democratic government and God-rooted family traditions. 

The Palestinians, in contrast, have suffered punishing poverty and deprivation because of the iron manacles of its authoritarian fanatics, the inhumane Hamas savages who place a higher value on making bombs to kill Jews than on freeing their people to live peacefully and prosper.

No one knows how this war will turn out. But we will have faith that the “Remnants” will prevail.

In 1946, Albert J. Nock, the Charles Krauthammer of his time, wrote an essay entitled, “Isaiah’s Job.” It was the story of how God sent Isaiah out to warn the Israelites of the wrath to come if they didn’t  quit their errant behavior and follow God’s promises.

God also told Isaiah not to be surprised when the masses ignored him. But he told Isaiah not be discouraged. In Nock’s words, God told Isaiah when “everything has gone completely to the dogs,” the Remnants — “obscure and unorganized,” “rubbing along as best they can” — “will come back and build up a new society.”

But how many Remnants are there? Isaiah asked. God told Isaiah not to worry. “Take my word for it, they are there.”