“October 7 was kind of like the American Revolution. If you take away the context.” —Trevor Noah
“True, true.” —Ta-Nahesi Coates
A few days I ago, on the anniversary of that despicable act, I commemorated October 7, 2023 with the essay Facing Down Evil. A few days later I witness this conversation between Trevor Noah and Ta-Nahesi Coates. Trevor Noah says, “October 7 was kind of like the American Revolution. If you take away the context.” Did the American patriots cross the ocean, enter English towns, and, while some people participated in a festival and others in ordinary daily activities, massacre civilians, rape women, and take hostages? When did this happen? In what context would this ever be acceptable?
There is no context in which such an act is acceptable. There was zero moral justification for Hamas action that day. Hamas is a genocidal death cult, those who participated in these actions the result of conditioned sociopathy from birth. Sociopathy at this depth cannot be reasoned with. The only option is annihilation. That the promise of paradise in Islam is a lie is icing on the cake. To be sure, the martyrs will never know their obsession was for naught. But I will. Hell is an imagined someplace. Annihilation is nowhere. Like Islam’s paradise.
Ta-Nahesi Coates: “The example I think about all the time is like Nat Turner, right? Like Nat Turner launches his rebellion in 1830. This man slaughters babies in their cribs. You know what I mean? And I’ve done this thought experience, this experiment for myself over and over. Does the degradation and dehumanization of slavery make it so that you can look past something like that? I try to imagine, and I think I can accurately imagine as much as possible, that there were enslaved people, no matter how dehumanized that said, ‘This is too far. I can’t do that.’”
He could have stopped there. But he didn’t. “Now, here’s the flip side of it,” he continued, “and I haven’t said this out loud, but I think about it a lot. Where I, twenty years old, born into Gaza, which is a giant open air jail [it’s not], and what I mean by that is if my father is a fisherman and he goes too far out into the sea, he might get shot by somebody off of, you know, inside of Israeli boats. If my mother picks the olive trees and she gets too close to the wall, she might be shot. If my little sister has cancer and she needs treatment because there are no facilities to do that in Gaza and I don’t get the right permit, she might die, and I grow up under that oppression and that poverty, and the wall comes down, am I also strong enough, or even constructed in such a way where I say, this is too far, I don’t know that I am. I don’t know that I am. I don’t know that I am.”
Everything Coates describes is the consequence of Palestinian resistance to peaceful coexistence with Israel. But put that aside for now. This is what is at issue: the problem of morality. Any truly moral person knows that this October 7 is too far. For such a person, perpetrating October 7 is unimaginable. A moral person does not excuse October 7 with an exercise in empathy that reimagines himself capable of such things, because such an exercise only dresses itself in empathy to engage in an exercise in justifying the indefensible. What brings a person to be able to think like this, to even suggest it? Deep seated hatred and loathing for victims of October 7—not for what they did (they did nothing), but for who they are.
freedom and reason 