Hamas’s Boasting Indicts the West
Unlike Hitler and Stalin, today’s mass murderers can expect our elites to cheer their atrocities.
By Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro
A September 2025 demonstration in New York. Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty ImagesHow did Rosalia Shikhberg become Karen Jones?
After Ms. Shikhberg was shot in the Bondi Beach massacre, the Sydney hospital that admitted her redacted her religion from the entry file and gave her an alias.
She was told this was to protect her from the media, but she believes “they were afraid of staff, not media.”
She recalled that two Australian nurses publicly stated last year that rather than treat Israeli patients if they came to their hospital, they would kill them.
What those nurses said was terrifying; that they felt empowered to say it publicly is even more so.
What has happened to Western civilization?
The Nazis concealed their crimes.
They taunted their victims with the threat that no one would ever discover what had happened to them.
The U.S.S.R. pretended there was no Gulag and vehemently denied the terror famine, in which several million peasants were deliberately starved to death during the collectivization of agriculture.
Either these dictators knew what they were doing was wrong or, more likely, they were sure that others would think so.
In both cases, the outside world was careful not to investigate what was taking place, lest it be forced to act.
Lenin supposedly referred to (and clearly considered) those who naively believed his propaganda as “useful idiots.”
Some of them weren’t idiots at all but knew they were hiding crimes they didn’t want to advertise.
The American press played along.
Following the wishes of certain highly placed government officials and catering to some readers’ antisemitism, newspapers soft-pedaled news up through the Holocaust until the carnage became impossible to ignore.
Politicians did, too.
In 1937 Secretary of State Cordell Hull apologized to the German government after New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia referred to Hitler as “a fanatic who is now menacing the peace of the world.”
Hitler, you see, was no different than other world leaders, and the same was routinely said of “Uncle Joe” Stalin.
Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, whom Stalin favored with direct access, insisted there was no famine in the U.S.S.R.
Intellectuals followed suit.
In a 1933 letter to the Manchester Guardian, George Bernard Shaw and 20 other recent visitors to the Soviet Union referred to the reports of famine as absurd counterrevolutionary propaganda.
“Particularly offensive and ridiculous,” they opined, “is the revival of the old attempts to represent the condition of Russian workers as one of slavery and starvation.”
Instead, they saw a “hopeful and enthusiastic working-class,” enjoying freedom from the “tyranny and incompetence of their former rulers” and “setting an example of industry and conduct” for all to emulate.
Were these Soviet defenders purposely deceiving themselves?
The French aphorist François de La Rochefoucauld remarked that “hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.”
Those who pretend to be innocent of a crime tacitly affirm that it is one.
By concealing the murder of millions, Hitler and Stalin, along with Pol Pot, Mao and others who committed atrocities, paid that tribute.
When useful idiots play along, the hypocrisy is double: Perpetrators pretend to be humane, and apologists pretend to believe them.
Oct. 7, 2023, displayed something different.
Far from hiding its brutality, Hamas advertised it, filming and broadcasting sadistic cruelty.
It touted the torture and execution of Israeli women and children as a great moral accomplishment, using the killing as a recruitment tool.
Recall the enthusiastic tone of that young man who called his parents from the phone of an Israeli woman he had just murdered, imploring his mother and father to open up WhatsApp.
“Look how many I killed with my own hands.
Your son killed Jews!” he told his father.
His parents were overjoyed.
“My son, God bless you,“ his father said.
“I wish I was with you,” his mother added.
Rather than a coverup, this was a media event.
What explains the difference between Hitler and Stalin, who denied their atrocities, and Hamas?
Could it be that Hamas knew that many in its Western audience, unlike in Hitler’s and Stalin’s time, would celebrate its crimes as noble resistance?
If so, Hamas’s openness indicts our own culture or, at least, its intellectuals.
Within days after Oct. 7, American campuses exploded with anti-Zionist and antisemitic rhetoric.
Almost immediately, more than 30 Harvard student groups endorsed Hamas’s actions as justified.
University presidents testified that the acceptability of calling for the annihilation of the Jewish people “depends on the context.”
When New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani argues, however implausibly, that the call to “globalize the intifada” is somehow ambiguous, he is at least paying La Rochefoucauld’s tribute to decency.
That wasn’t the case at a rally at the Sydney Opera House held two days after the Oct. 7 massacre, when the crowd burned Israeli flags and chanted “Where are the Jews?”
On the first night of Hanukkah in 2025, they were at Bondi Beach.
Today’s mass murderers no longer need to hide their crimes from the West’s educated elites, who applaud them.
Terrorist boasting testifies to our own moral decline.
Mr. Morson is a professor of Slavic literature at Northwestern University.
Mr. Schapiro is a Northwestern emeritus professor of economics and president emeritus.
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