Israel accused the United Nations on Monday of failing to respond adequately to accounts that Hamas carried out widespread sexual violence against women when it attacked Israel on October 7. According to Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, “Sadly, the very international bodies that are supposedly the defenders of all women showed that when it comes to Israelis, indifference is acceptable.”

About one hundred and fifty activists also marched in front of the UN headquarters. One speaker said, “When the institutions that are globally mandated to protect women stay silent—not only international law loses meaning; humanity’s shared values lose meaning.” Yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu similarly voiced his anger that the international community is ignoring atrocities against Israeli women.

Their statements highlight one of the great travesties resulting from Hamas’s slaughter of Israelis on October 7: despite overwhelming evidence of Hamas’s brutal crimes against women, their brutality has been ignored, described as morally equivalent to Israel’s response in Gaza, or even defended in the West.

“Reminiscent of a dark time in history”

Some of this silence and even support for Hamas can be explained simply as antisemitism. For example, protesters targeted a Jewish-owned kosher falafel shop in Philadelphia with chants of “genocide,” moving Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) to call the demonstration “a blatant act of antisemitism” and to warn, “This hate and bigotry is reminiscent of a dark time in history.”

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Lance Morrow describes the rising antisemitism after October 7 as “the return of pure hatred of the Jews.” However, as Morrow notes, “The new Jew-haters—especially young people on campuses—think of themselves as perfectly virtuous. What is a thousand times worse, they think of their Jew-hatred as righteous. It’s morally fashionable among them.”

The reasons have been well documented: many in this generation have been taught that Israel stole, occupied, and colonized its land from its rightful Palestinian owners. Viewed through the prism of Critical Theory, the Jews are seen as majority oppressors of the oppressed Palestinian minority.

In a recent poll, 48 percent of college-age students said they sided with Hamas in its war with Israel. One college student was adamant: “Gaza is not a two-sided war. What is happening is the resistance of the oppressed against their oppressor.”

But many who are supporting Hamas have also been vocal in fighting for gender equality. Why, then, are they ignoring or justifying the Hamas terrorists’ violence against women?

Beware the “licensing effect”

For decades, many in academia have embraced the postmodern claim that all truth claims are relative and subjective, a worldview that has produced generations of moral confusion. As a result, when faced with conflicting truth claims, many think they are free to accept only those that align with their personal beliefs.

For example, many claim that Israel is a genocidal “occupier” of Palestine and therefore believe that the crimes of its “victims” can be justifiably ignored or justified. But not just the Jews are in jeopardy: anyone whose beliefs run counter to the ideologies of the cultural elite and the universities that produce them are in similar danger. As I have warned often in recent years, this danger especially includes those of us who defend biblical truth in the face of escalating sexual immorality.

Paradoxically (and nonsensically), the champions of tolerance insist that those they judge “intolerant” must not be tolerated. This is an example of the “licensing effect” by which people who believe they are virtuous worry less about their own behavior, making them more susceptible to immorality.

As a result, those who have biblical answers to the moral issues of our time are rejected before these answers can be shared with those who need them most. If you are convinced that all doctors are dangerous to society, you won’t listen to their medical advice, no matter how sick you become. This is one of the ways Satan has “blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:4).

Ben Franklin’s advice on persuasion

During this Advent week of hope, how can we share the hope of Christ with people who do not believe they need such hope?

As we continue to reflect on the shepherds in the Christmas story, consider their motivation in leaving their flocks to worship the Christ: they were told that “a Savior” had been born “unto you” and that he would bring “peace” to those who believe in him (Luke 2:11, 14).

As Ben Franklin advised: “If you would persuade, appeal to interest, not to reason.”

Every human, even the most postmodern among us, is created for intimacy with our Creator. It is in their innate interest to place their hope for the present and the future in his transforming love and grace. However, for the reasons we have discussed today, they are unlikely to consider logical appeals for the gospel.

What they cannot ignore, however, is its results in our lives.

The more intimately we know Jesus, the more persuasively we can make him known. As Christ lives “in” us (Colossians 1:27), the Spirit makes us more like Jesus (Romans 8:29). As a result, we love those who do not love us (1 Peter 4:8). We serve those who reject us (cf. John 13:14). We pray for those who persecute us (Matthew 5:44).

And, as the hymn suggests, “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.”

Who will know that you’re a Christian today?

Denison Forum

In the latest Indiana Jones movie, eighty-one-year-old Harrison Ford was de-aged forty years by artificial intelligence (AI). Accordingly, Sean Connery fans might hope they’ll see a young version of the first James Bond in the next Bond film. Alas, producer Barbara Broccoli has announced that, while the next 007’s identity is currently unknown, James Bond will not be an AI-rendered actor from the past.

Fans of the Swedish rock band ABBA are suffering no such disappointment. The group is currently making $2 million a week performing as avatars (lifelike digital images projected onto a screen). The band KISS now plans to do the same. “We can be forever young and forever iconic by taking us to places we’ve never dreamed of before,” KISS bassist Gene Simmons said.

Is this a good thing? Or is it just a less ominous example of a crisis that threatens us all?

“They’re some new kind of human”

Teenage girls in New Jersey were recently victimized by such technology when it was used to generate nude images of them that were then circulated at their high school. The Department of Homeland Security is warning that “deepfake” technology is being employed to generate hundreds of thousands of pornographic images, including those of children.

Fake audio is being used to steal passwords and breach financial accounts. Deepfake videos are being used to manipulate political opinion and voters. Retired Army Gen. Mark Milley is warning that “robust space and cyber capabilities [now] allow adversaries to target critical national infrastructure” vital to our military defenses. (For more, see my website paper, “ChatGPT and artificial intelligence: What you need to know.”)

But there’s an even deeper element to this rising threat.

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan writes:

What is most urgently disturbing to me is that if America speeds forward with AI it is putting the fate of humanity in the hands of the men and women of Silicon Valley, who invented the internet as it is, including all its sludge. And there’s something wrong with them. They’re some new kind of human, brilliant in a deep yet narrow way, prattling on about connection and compassion but cold at the core. They seem apart from the great faiths of past millennia, apart from traditional moral or ethical systems or assumptions about life.

Finding “Bethlehem” today

This is the Advent week of “hope.” I would define hope as confidence in the future that brings benefits in the present. Soldiers hope their Boot Camp training is preparing them to serve their country more effectively, and this belief sustains them in their present challenges. Students hope their years of education will lead to careers that repay their investment, and this belief enables them to stay the course.

However, the validity of our hope depends on its basis. If you have cancer but place your hope in aspirin rather than oncology, your hope is not only misplaced but dangerous.

Similarly, if we hope that humans can solve humanity’s greatest problems, our hope deters us from trusting the One whose omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence we need so desperately. As creatures of such a Creator, our most empowering hope lies in submission to his gracious sovereignty.

Like the Christmas shepherds, we need to experience personally “a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11). But we no longer must “go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened” (v. 15) because it is happening in us. Oswald Chambers noted:

Every man is meant to be the “Bethlehem” of the Son of God by the regenerative power of redemption. Just as the historic Son of God became incarnate in the Virgin Mary . . . so the Son of God is formed in the life of the individual saint by the supernatural grace of God.

“With him everything else thrown in”

Paul assured us that “Christ in you” is “the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27, my emphasis). How could it be otherwise?

“In [Christ] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (v. 19). As Richard Melick notes, “Everything that God is, Jesus is.” Thus, “through him” God could “reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (v. 20). Because God died for us, God has the moral authority to forgive us for the sins that caused his death. He can thus make peace (the Greek word means to “make all things right”) in us, with us, and for us.

This is why the ultimate solution to every problem we face is found in daily submission to our Savior. When he is our Lord, his Spirit will guide us infallibly with regard to AI and every other challenge we face. We will love our neighbor as ourselves, whether they are Palestinian or Israeli, Chinese or American, Democrat or Republican. And our differences will lead not to cultural division and destructive animosity but to kaleidoscopic celebration.

C. S. Lewis advised us, “Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find him, and with him everything else thrown in.”

For whom will you “look” today?

Denison Forum