They chose to be evil

Today is October 7. Three years ago, Hamas terrorists murdered people at the Nova music festival and in their homes, and dragged others into Gaza as hostages. Today is a day to remember the victims and the families whose lives were shattered.

This morning's entry in The Daily Stoic is "A Selfish Reason to Be Good." It quotes Marcus Aurelius:

The person who does wrong, does wrong to themselves. The unjust person is unjust to themselves, making themselves evil.

That last phrase resonates today: making themselves evil.

The people who planned and carried out October 7 chose to murder, torture, and kidnap. These were deliberate acts. No cause excuses them. Calling those choices evil is not a failure to understand history or appreciate complexity. Understanding something does not require excusing it.

My condemnation does not stop at Hamas membership. Anyone who knowingly helped make those murders possible bears responsibility for that choice. Anyone who celebrates the slaughter of civilians deserves condemnation for theirs. Not carrying a gun does not make someone an innocent bystander when they knowingly help the people who do. Responsibility rests on those choices, not simply on where someone lives. And that condemnation reaches beyond Hamas and beyond Gaza, to the woke, the self-proclaimed intellectuals who are so clearly wrong, every one of them who keeps supporting this.

Marcus is talking about what our actions make of us. He is not promising that every wrongdoer will be caught or punished. Becoming evil is its own damage, but it is hardly justice for the people you hurt. A murderer's corrupted character does not return anyone's child.

I want justice, not merely a philosophical observation about the people who made it necessary. I believe those responsible will get theirs in the end. That belief is not a claim that justice has already been done, or that evil conveniently destroys itself. It is a conviction that getting away with something is not the same as being beyond judgment.

Today, though, I want to remember the people whose lives were stolen. The young people dancing. The families at home. People with plans for that afternoon and no reason to think they would never see it.

They deserve remembrance. Their murderers and knowing accomplices deserve to answer for every life they took and every life they shattered.

Until they do, may the ones who committed this violence, and the ones who continue their badly failing crusade against Israel and Jews, find no refuge and no peace.