Gary Willig is a veteran member of the Arutz Sheva news staff.
What is pure evil? Pure evil is the kind of evil embodied by Hamas. An evil incorruptible by greed, by self-preservation, or any other factor.
During World War Two, German industrialist Oskar Schindler was able to save over a thousand innocent Jews from being sent to the death camps or executed by bribing Nazi officials. This was a case where bribery and corruption were a good thing and served to mitigate the evil of the Nazis and save many innocent lives.
The terrorists of Hamas have recently been offered a similar bribe. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised that anyone who frees a hostage they are currently holding would be given five million dollars and safe passage out of Gaza.
Five million dollars. With exactly 100 hostages left in Gaza, both living and dead, that comes out to $500 million in total. And yet, not a single person in Gaza has taken Israel’s offer. Not a single hostage holder has come forward.
It’s hard to even fathom this. There is little an ordinary person would not do for the promise of five million dollars. And yet this is not enough for the butchers of Hamas. Five million dollars is not enough to compel them to release 5-year-old Ariel Bibas or his 1-year-old brother Kfir.
Hamas is following the example of the infamous Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who personally intervened when the Nazis showed a willingness to free a group of Jewish children to ensure that those children would be sent to the death camps rather than be allowed to live.
Hamas leaders are as greedy as anyone. Just look at how they live as billionaires in the lap of luxury in Qatar. Perhaps those leaders have so much money that five million dollars is a drop in the bucket to them. But the rank and file who claim poverty and blame Israel for it? It takes a special kind of evil to override both the allure of millions of dollars and a guarantee of personal safety. It takes a pure, incorruptible form of evil to refuse to release a baby being held hostage no matter how sweet the deal being offered for the baby.
This is a hatred that cannot be reasoned with, a hatred that is so pure, so powerful, that it overrides all other considerations. Hamas already proved on October 7, after lulling Israel into a false sense of security by pretending to seek economic development for Gaza, that it cannot be bribed into not killing Jews.
There is nothing Hamas can be given that will compel it to mitigate its evil in any way, nothing its believers can be given to compel them to ever do the right thing and let so much as a single hostage go.
As if more proof of how evil Hamas is was needed, Reuters this week reported that the Hamas leadership has ordered its members who are holding the hostages to “neutralize” their hostages if rescue appears to be at hand. Just like the Nazis when they began to lose the war they started, killing innocent Jewish prisoners is the most important thing to Hamas.
For Hamas, there is no higher value than killing Jews. Hatred is the guiding star of its entire movement. It would kill a thousand Arabs in order to kill one Jewish child, and will never stop until every last Jewish man, woman, and child is obliterated from the face of the Earth.
This is the evil that UNRWA employs, joins and defends. This is the evil that the antisemitic mobs around the world cheer for. This is the evil that Western leaders in the US, UK, France, Canada, Australia, and more, seek to appease. Worse, they seek to protect and preserve this evil so that it can rise and kill again.
US President-Elect Donald Trump, for all his personal moral failings, demonstrated a level of moral clarity unseen from Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Justin Trudeau, or Keir Starmer this week when he published a warning to Hamas that the hostages had better be released by the time of his inauguration or there will be “all hell to pay.”
This is the line that should have been taken with Hamas by Biden the moment the October 7 attack began. It is the line that should have been taken with Hamas decades ago. The evil of Hamas cannot be compromised with. It cannot be diluted by bribes. It cannot be lived with, and it cannot be allowed to continue to exist.
Pure evil exists. Its name is Hamas. And it must be utterly destroyed.