Thousands of years ago, in the Middle East, cradle not just of civilization but of many gods, was a deity named Moloch. Today, he would be considered a pagan god by those of the one God of Abraham, with whom he long coexisted. But in that time, he prevailed for centuries. Like the God of Abraham, he was an angry god (though not clearly a jealous one). But the God of Abraham was more complex, and — at least later — merciful, and also loving.*
Moloch was a lot simpler. He was purely malevolent, and basically an extortionist — one that any modern gangster would recognize and admire.
His deal was basically this: “I am the bringer of the sun. Nice little city you have here. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it, like the crops dying because the sun didn’t show up. I can make sure that doesn’t happen. I don’t ask much — a temple with priests and ritual prostitutes, and an occasional sacrifice.”
His representative in the temple was an upright bull with horns and crown, gaping mouth, and outstretched arms. On sacrifice days, within him raged a fire.
The crowds would gather around and chant, and the drums would beat, and the ungodly din would drown out the screams of unknowing infant terror and keening mothers. Babies were brought up to the arms of Moloch, and through an ancient ingenious mechanism, raised up to his mouth to cruelly plummet them to the inferno below.
And to reinforce the tradition, the sun continued to shine.
But eventually, the God of Abraham became dominant in the Middle East, with three major religions worshiping him. Moloch was abandoned.
Fast forward to the early twenty-first century in the Middle East. There is a new child-sacrifice cult in the ancient land, albeit one that claims to be of the God of Abraham.
This time, the purpose of the sacrifice is not to keep the sun shining and the crops growing. This sacrifice is to placate the gods, or devils, in the news media and to help the people achieve a much different and less laudable goal — the extinction of another people.
In 2009, in the “Gaza strip,” one of the ancient Philistine cities, an Islamic group called Hamas has the goal to, as part of its charter, destroy all Jews in creation.
It lacks the military resources or competence to do so for now, but it satisfies itself with merely attempting, however ineffectually, to kill whatever Jews lie within the range of its unguided rockets. While few of them hit their marks (which, were they to satisfy their wont, would apparently be kindergartens and ice-cream parlors, or wherever young Jews would most likely be present in the highest density), they are of sufficient danger to continually disrupt the lives of those at whom they are aimed, if such a word can be applied to so crude a weapon.
But the crudity of the munitions is beside the point, isn’t it? What is important is the intent.
Hamas wants Jewish children to die. The Jews want their children to live. Beyond that, the Jews even want the children of Hamas to live. This is evidenced not just by the pains and risk to their own troops they take to carefully target those trying to kill them, and to minimize (though they cannot be eliminated, for reasons explained shortly) the number of Hamas children hurt, to the point of issuing warnings when they will be attacking their parents thus decreasing the probability of killing the actual enemy. It is also demonstrated by their willingness to take the wounded into their own hospitals for treatment when permissible.
But herein lies the real asymmetry between the two sides. Hamas doesn’t merely want to kill the Jewish children (though of course they do want to kill them, for no other reason than that they are Jews, in accordance with their diabolical charter). They are also willing and eager to sacrifice their own.
How?
In any way imaginable. They set up rocket-launching bases in schools, which will become targets for retaliation. They establish military quarters in family homes, where children can be counted on to be present. They even go so far as to establish military headquarters in the basement of Gaza’s largest hospital, which will ensure that if they are attacked, not just children, but sick and injured children, as well as sick and injured adults and their caregivers, will be maimed or killed.
And they do not do this simply to protect themselves by using the young, sick, and otherwise helpless as human shields, though that would be bad enough and is a major war crime in and of itself. But apparently, it is a war crime that the media dare not say its name.
No, they do it in the hope that those young — down to the babies, sick and, helpless — will in fact be killed so that they can be paraded before their allies, witting or otherwise, in the western media, to aid them in their goal of at least temporarily ending the Jewish defensive onslaught upon them. This is all done in the hope that that their enemy will, once again, be politically defanged, and that once again, it will buy them time to rearm, with better weaponry, and take up again their ultimate genocidal cause.
That they are not merely cowards, hiding behind infants’ diapers, but rather actually desirous of the death of their own offspring is revealed by their own words of indoctrination, in which they encourage their own children to become martyrs to their evil cause. As further evidence that death is the intent, news stories are offered by them to show the deaths, even when they didn’t necessarily happen.
Moloch has returned to the Mideast, after millennia. Except this time, the maw of the bull is the eye of the camera lens, into which the slaughter of the innocents is fed to a complicit press to be passed on to a gullible world.
And this time, those sacrificing the children don’t want to drown out the noise of the terrified screams of those tossed to the fire. The screams, and (as always) the terror, are the whole point.
But at the rate things are going, perhaps the media’s sun, unlike Moloch’s, may start to dim. If so, and if this behavior continues, those of us less morally challenged will not fear the eclipse, but rather, will welcome it.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member