SHAPIRO: The West needs a wake-up call from its history vacation

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In the West, we are on vacation from history.

That’s because we live on the interest our parents and grandparents earned. Until the war in Ukraine, the European continent had never experienced a more peaceful respite from history than since the end of the Cold War. America has enjoyed its peace dividend, with spending ballooning to unprecedented levels and our wars fought in distant lands.

When you are on vacation from history, you tend to engage in foolish fallacies. Fallacies like the idea that evil doesn’t exist; that negotiation solves all conflict and that weakness brings with it peace instead of war; that apologizing for Western civilization is a corrective to past injustice rather than an incentive for future violence.

On Oct. 7, 2023, history returned with a vengeance.

On that day, Hamas — an evil terrorist group — invaded Israel and engaged in a triumphant orgy of rape and slaughter, the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Some 1,200 Israelis were murdered and 250 were dragged back into the hellhole of Gaza.

Hamas proved evil does exist. The terrorists and their civilian counterparts celebrated their evil. They live-streamed it. They cheered as the broken and mutilated bodies of the slain were paraded through Gaza. They handed out candies as teenage dancers were raped and shot at a music festival.

Yes, evil exists. It turns out human beings are not all seeking the same things and do not all have the same priorities or the same values.

Hamas proved that conciliation with evil and weakness toward it brings about only suffering. Israel has surrendered territory to a variety of terrorist groups over the past few decades: Areas of the West Bank — Biblical Judea and Samaria — to the terrorist Palestinian Authority; the Gaza Strip to Hamas; southern Lebanon to Hezbollah. All have become terror havens.

The only way to defeat evil is through credible threats of crushing force. The Western fallacy that negotiation is a strategy rather than a tactic, that we can talk our enemies into peace, is indeed a lie. Victory brings about peace and strength brings about peace.

The year since Oct. 7 proved that the West has lost its way.

We have lost our way.

For a moment after Oct. 7, the West sympathized with the Israelis. And then the West decided to go back to sleep — to watch its children march with Hamas and Hezbollah flags alongside terror supporters imported from abroad. The West decided Israel had committed a grave sin in defending herself, no matter how meticulous or necessary the operations.

The West, still enjoying its vacation from history, decided it was easier to go back to sleep than to engage with reality.

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And yet history does not stop.

History does not stop because there is, in fact, no end to history and no conciliation between all cultures. The promises of Isaiah that swords will be beaten into ploughshares remain unfulfilled and, until the coming of a messiah, will continue to remain so. The United Nations statue depicting a gun with its barrel-end tied into a knot remains more a mockery than a tribute.

History will continue because human evil is quite real.

The only hope for a truly peaceful world isn’t a somnambulant West, too busy apologizing for its existence to defend itself. It is a strong and virile West, willing to stand for itself and to defeat those who would challenge it.

After Oct. 7, Israel learned that lesson. And Israelis paid the price.

And so Israel will not go back to sleep. Hamas has been decimated; Hezbollah is being systematically destroyed; Iran lives in fear of Israeli retaliation. All of which is good.

But the West must understand a simple truth: Just because Israel is located on the bleeding edge of history doesn’t mean that the vacation for the rest of the West can last. In fact, it’s already ending. And the more the West insists on turning over and hitting the snooze button, the worse history’s wake-up call will be.

— Ben Shapiro is host of The Ben Shapiro Show and co-founder of Daily Wire+