Is Hamas Evil? Is Anybody Evil? Am I? Are You?

Is Hamas evil? Am I? Are you? Is anybody evil?

President Joe Biden has said, in so many words, that, yes indeed, Hamas is evil.

(If Hamas is evil, then so am I. And I’ll tell that story in a minute.)

Biden was careful in his choice of words during his remarks on Tuesday, just days after Hamas’ monstrous assault on Israeli citizens. He did not say outright that the human beings of Hamas were evil. But the implication was clear: “There are moments in this life,” he said. “And I mean this literally — when the pure, unadulterated evil is unleashed on this world.”

Evil. Literally. Unleashed.

On Wednesday, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, echoed the President. Hamas’ massacre of 1,000 Israeli citizens, she asserted, “reflected an ‘ancient evil.'”

Can We Please Tone Down the Rhetoric?

Lately, I’ve been wishing that everybody would please tone down the rhetoric. In the U.S., folks to my left and to my right, but mostly to my right, have been indulging in a lot of inflammatory name-calling.

And Biden’s use of the word evil this week took the rhetoric up a notch.

It was intense. Worse than that. It was speech heavy with spiritual judgement, of damnation.

A close look at my trusty Webster’s Third New International Dictionary turned up several inches of fine print on the word evil. One connotation on offer was, “A cosmic force producing evil actions or states.”

And that’s what I hear when I hear the word evil — a malevolent, supernatural force, a satanic force whose essence is the intentional defiance of God and all that is good.

And so, to my ears, describing Hamas as capable of “sheer evil” implies that Hamas is satanic, against God, beyond salvation, and in need of obliteration at any moral cost.

Which raises the question — does Israel now feel it has license to commit atrocities against Hamas?

 Is Anybody Evil? 

Is anybody evil? Am I? Are you?

I don’t think so. Humans evolved — some would say we were divinely created — to be capable of both kindness and cruelty.

The message of the world’s great wisdom teachings has been consistent over the millennia: “Choose the good. Resist the bad. Let the divine help you toward the good.”

Am I Evil?

The impulse to do bad things, sadistic things, is ever present in human nature. It’s just there.

When I was a kid, maybe 8 years old, a young playmate and I chose to lock her little sister, still a toddler, in a closet.

We listened for the sister’s wails from within the closet. We heard them. We enjoyed them. (At least I did. Not sure about my playmate.)

Ours was an act of human sadism, pure and simple.

I have not forgotten what I did on that day, so long ago. I have not forgotten the sadistic pleasure of it.

If it’s an act that leaves me feeling shamed, why do I let myself remember it so clearly?

I think the reason is that the good in me has been at work all this time. The human tendency toward the good has insisted that I keep that shameful memory alive, pull it out from time to time, and work it over — remind myself that I am not perfect.  And, since I am not perfect, remind myself that no one else is perfect.

Germans, Americans, Palestinians, Israelis

In my early twenties, I spent a year as a student in Germany. What was it about the Germans, I wondered at the time, made it possible for them to murder millions of Jews, prisoners of war, homosexuals, and others during World War II?

I got my answer when I returned home from Germany in 1964. My own country was now waging a brutal war in Vietnam. A war that led to war crimes, including eventually the mass murder of hundreds of civilians at Mi Lai in 1968.

All human beings, I concluded, were capable of savagery.

Locked in That Closet

A few years ago, I ran into the woman who had been that toddler wailing from the closet.

I said hello and went straight to the point, “Do you remember? We locked you in that closet. You were just a little kid. That was a terrible thing we did to you.”

Her reply was simple. “I forgive you.”

“You do?”

I was stunned. I was astonished. Astonished to know that she could remember that event a half century later. That she had worked through the terror and anger she must have felt as a little child. That she forgave me. That I could be forgiven.

And that, because I could be forgiven, I was not evil.

More on the big questions at “Where Author Richard Rodriguez Sees the Face of God.”   Also, “Do We Live in a Pointless Universe?”