The corruption of Hamas and Amy Coney Barrett on the power of the law

An Israeli air strike on Doha, Qatar, killed five members of Hamas and a member of Qatar’s Internal Security Force yesterday. The strike took place shortly after Hamas claimed responsibility for a shooting that killed six people at a bus stop in Jerusalem on Monday.

Hamas leaders were gathered in Qatar to discuss a US proposal for a ceasefire in Gaza. However, the New York Times also reports that the attack “targeted a residential headquarters where a number of senior Hamas politicians lived.”

Here’s a question worth considering: Why were Hamas leaders living in a residence more than a thousand miles from the Gaza Strip they presumably serve?

And here’s what many people don’t know: Many of Hamas’s leaders living abroad are billionaires. According to the Telegraph, those living in Qatar do so in “five-star luxury.” This while, according to the United Nations, 65 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza live below the poverty line.

This disparity exists because Hamas is a dictatorship. After it came to power in Gaza in 2007, there have been no more elections.

Its terrorist leaders could therefore stage a horrific invasion of Israel on Oct. 7 with no accountability to the people of Gaza. They can profit personally while impoverishing the population. They can hide themselves and their soldiers and weapons behind civilian shields because they view the people as a means to their ends.

In fact, they want Israeli soldiers to harm Gazan civilians in order to turn public opinion against Israel and advance Hamas.

“A government of laws, not of men”

By contrast, as John Adams noted, the United States is “a government of laws, not of men.”

Americans elect the president by national vote, the Senate by statewide vote, and the House of Representatives by district vote. These leaders then enact laws intended to serve the common good. If we disagree, we can elect leaders who will revise or rescind such laws, as has been done often in our history.

But what about holding our leaders accountable to the laws of the land? James Madison noted: “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

To enable such control, the Founders devised another layer of accountability, creating an unelected Supreme Court whose sole job is to interpret the Constitution and other laws as written and hold leaders and their actions accountable to them.

Amy Coney Barrett’s new book

These reflections have been on my mind in light of yesterday’s publication of Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution by Supreme Court associate justice Amy Coney Barrett. Her book is both readable and deeply fascinating, with behind-the-scenes descriptions of the actual work of the Court as well as her explanation of its function.

She states that the Court’s story cannot be separated from the US Constitution, “which is both its birth certificate and life’s work.” Accordingly, she writes:

We judges don’t dispense justice solely as we see it; instead, we’re constrained by law adopted through the democratic process. We exercise authority that the people have given us and resolve disputes according to the ground rules that the people have prescribed. . . .

In our system, a judge must abide by the rules set by the American people, both in the Constitution and legislation. . . . The guiding principle in every case is what the law requires, not what aligns with the judge’s own concept of justice.

Justice Barrett cites the death penalty as a personal example. A number of years ago, she co-authored an academic article “expressing a moral objection to capital punishment.” Then, soon after her appointment, the Court considered a death sentence imposed on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers. She joined the Court’s holding that Tsarnaev’s death sentence was valid. As she notes,

That was not the only course open to me. Given my view of capital punishment, I could have looked for ways to slant the law in favor of defendants facing the death penalty. There were, after all, plausible arguments going Tsarnaev’s way—the court of appeals agreed with him, as did three of my colleagues in dissent. Had I voted in favor of Tsarnaev, no one would have known that I did it because I objected to the death penalty rather than because I concluded that Tsarnaev had the better of the argument.

But that would have been a dereliction of duty. . . . My office doesn’t entitle me to align the legal system with my moral or policy views. Swearing to apply the law faithfully means deciding each case based on my best judgment about what the law is, not what it should be.

As she explains, judges are “referees, not kings, because they decide whether people have played by the rules rather than what the rules should be.”

“The hallmark of a life of holiness”

As Justice Barrett’s book and the corruption of Hamas officials both illustrate, a government of laws rather than of men is enormously preferrable to the reverse. However, such laws are of course created and enforced by people. And people, including the Founders, are obviously fallen and flawed. (Consider that the large majority of those who signed the Declaration of Independence, with its assertion that “all men are created equal,” were slaveowners at the time.)

This is why fallen people need wisdom beyond our own. It is why we need the laws of God and the power of God by which to obey them. The good news is that, as I noted yesterday, the same Holy Spirit who inspired the word of God now guides us to interpret it and empowers us to obey it.

The key is wanting such guidance and power. It is wanting to live by a higher standard than anything humans can produce. It is seeking the holiness only a holy God can manifest in us, measuring ourselves by the “fruit” of his Spirit in our lives (Galatians 5:22–23) and paying any price to settle for nothing less.

Br. Lucas Hall of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Boston notes:

We might not be able to see over the horizon, but the pitched battle between good and evil that happens within the very mundane, day-to-day aspects of our lives is one we can take up again and again. The call to continue that work is the hallmark of a life of holiness. It may cost us everything: our lives, our understanding, our sense of clarity; and that offering is holy enough.

Will you seek such a “life of holiness” today?

Quote for the day:

“When you open your Bible, God opens his mouth.” —Mark Batterson

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More than twenty people were killed in a Russian attack on a village in eastern Ukraine this morning. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky posted on X: “A brutally savage Russian airstrike with an aerial bomb on the rural settlement of Yarova in the Donetsk region. Directly on people. Ordinary civilians. At the very moment when pensions were being disbursed.” His post showed horrific footage of bodies strewn across the ground.

When I saw the news, I admit that it felt like “more of the same.” This terrible war has been going on for more than three years. I have never been to Ukraine and don’t know that I know anyone directly affected by this tragic news.

And yet, far more people died in this morning’s airstrike than were killed in an attack on a bus depot in Jerusalem yesterday, a tragedy that I used to lead the Daily Article and have continued to grieve. My response comes from the fact that I have many friends in Israel, having led dozens of study tours there, and love the land and its people deeply.

Here’s my guess: many in our culture likely viewed the latter as I viewed the former, seeing another attack on Jews in Israel as irrelevant to their lives. Or even worse, they saw the victims of the Palestinian attackers as the villains and the attackers as the victims.

 “One of the fruits of the Oct. 7 attack”

One-sided media narratives against the Jewish state have been regularly debunked, but they persist, drowning out reporting that disagrees. As a result, 60 percent of young adults told a recent survey that they favor Hamas (which has been designated a terrorist organization by at least eight nations and the European Union) over Israel.

In addition, recent moves by various governments to recognize a Palestinian state have strengthened Hamas, whose leaders are calling them “one of the fruits of the Oct. 7 attack.”

The rise of antisemitism is tragically on display in America as well. According to the American Jewish Committee, attacks on Jews in our country “have reached shocking levels, affecting American Jewish behavior and sense of security like we haven’t witnessed before.” As just one example, a man speaking Hebrew was assaulted recently at the Santa Monica Pier, part of what officials are calling a “deplorable escalation of antisemitism across southern California.”

What explains this escalation?

The “Marvelization of reality”

Paul Miller is professor of the practice of international affairs at Georgetown University. A veteran of the war in Afghanistan, he served as a member of the National Security Council under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In a recent article for The Dispatch, he explains “the problem with framing the Israel-Hamas conflict as one between the powerful and the powerless.”

Dr. Miller perceptively describes the process through which the left came to view Israel as:

• A powerful overlord, with the Palestinians as the heroic resistance.
• A “settler-colonial” state, with the Palestinians as indigenous rebels.
• And “white,” with the Palestinians as their “nonwhite” victims.

As he shows, all three claims are spurious.

• Israel became powerful by defending itself from nations seeking its annihilation. This does not make it an “overlord” or evil by definition.
• It is not a settler-colonial state: it began resettling the land under the Ottoman and British empires and did not erase or replace the people already living in Palestine. In fact, the Arab population of historic Palestine grew from 1.4 million in 1948 to 7.4 million today.
• Israel isn’t white or European; an equal number of Israeli citizens are descendants of immigrants from Asia and Africa as from Europe; 20 percent of its population is Arab.

However, as Dr. Miller explains, none of this matters to Israel’s critics. In what he calls the “Marvelization of reality” whereby “we expect reality to conform to the story arcs of fiction,” there’s the protagonist (the Palestinians), the goal (statehood and liberation), and the villain (Israel).

In a complex world, we crave simplicity, with white hats for the good guys and black hats for the bad guys. And to much of America these days, Israel wears the black hat.

From active participants to passive consumers

This “Marvelization of reality” is relevant beyond Israel in ways that speak to our national future.

As author and educator Neil Postman warned in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, the television age turned us from active participants in society into passive consumers of entertaining sound bites. Digital technology exacerbates this trajectory, since we can now watch whatever we want for as long as it entertains us.

Since there is far too much content available for us to consume, we filter it by preconceived biases. And since we don’t produce the content we consume, we are at the mercy of those who do.

This is massively significant for our post-Christian society, which has no objective filter by which to discern truth from falsehood and, in fact, rejects the existence of objective truth itself. But it is just as significant for Christians in such a society.

We can be as secular as our secular friends. According to research by George Barna, about half of those who attend evangelical churches say there is no absolute moral truth and believe people can earn salvation through good works. Only four in ten believe humans are born into sin and need salvation in Christ. We can be swayed by entertainment that normalizes extramarital and same-sex sexual relations. We can evaluate political news through our partisan biases. We can measure success by cultural popularity rather than biblical obedience.

“He will guide you into all the truth”

I can claim that the answer is to view secular culture through the prism of the Bible, but skeptics will assert that this is just as biased as viewing the Bible through the prism of secular culture. After all, the Bible is a book like any other book, subjectively written by flawed people using words that must be subjectively interpreted by flawed people, or so they will say.

Here’s the difference: The Spirit who inspired these words can give us the discernment we need to understand and obey them.

Jesus promised that, in ways no secular person can understand, the Holy Spirit “will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (John 14:26). Accordingly, “his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true, and is no lie” (1 John 2:27).

Because he literally lives in you (1 Corinthians 3:16), the Spirit can speak to your mind and influence your spirit in ways no one else can. If you “keep in step with the Spirit” (Galatians 5:25), “he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). As the book of Acts and a plethora of spiritual awakenings across history show, he can empower and direct God’s people to impact their broken culture in transformative ways.

But he can guide only those who will follow. Would the Spirit say you are “in step” with him right now?

If not, why not?

Quote for the day:

“When we have the Holy Spirit, we have all that is needed to be all that God desires us to be.” —A. W. Tozer

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Denison Forum

At least six people were murdered and dozens were wounded when terrorists opened fire on civilians at a bus stop in Jerusalem this morning. The two attackers were killed at the scene; Hamas praised the shooting by “two Palestinian resistance fighters.”

This tragedy is especially personal for me on two levels. One is that I have led more than thirty study tours to Israel and love the country and its people. The other is that Ramot Junction, the site of the attack, is located at one of the main entry points to Jerusalem. I have traveled by it many times over the years and know that what happened there could have happened to me and to my fellow travelers.

In other news, Russia launched its largest attack on Ukraine over the weekend since the war began. At least four people were killed, including a two-month-old baby and the child’s mother. Dozens more were injured.

“I am the captain of my soul”

Queen Elizabeth II died on this day in 2022 at the age of ninety-six. Even though she was the longest-reigning monarch in British history, death found her as it will us all (unless Christ returns first).

Our very human fear of that moment is not just the threat of pain and suffering but also our innate dread of the unknown. We fear walking into a dark room or a dark forest, much less a dark future.

So we ignore the fact of human mortality when we can. I didn’t want to write about today’s tragic news from Jerusalem and Ukraine any more than you wanted to read about it. We euphemize death (people don’t die anymore, they merely “pass on”) and we seek to extend our lives through medical means.

When we fear death, we make this world our home and fight tooth and nail to stay here as long as we can. We measure success by temporal standards and drive ourselves to achieve it. And we go through life claiming, “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.”

Therein lies the issue I want to address today.

Liberalism failed because it succeeded

Patrick J. Deneen is a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame. In his masterful book Why Liberalism Failed, he describes “liberalism” (from the Latin liber, meaning “free”) as a view that “conceived humans as rights-bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life.” Over the centuries of its ascent, this view has led many of its followers to jettison everything that constrains individual freedom, including religious dogma, societal mores, and legal strictures.

Whether the topic is abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, or a host of other cultural issues, Western culture has “evolved” to a place of existential freedom in the quest for a temporal utopia.

How is this working for us?

Professor Deneen notes that “some 70 percent of Americans believe that their country is moving in the wrong direction,” while “every institution of government shows declining levels of public trust by the citizenry.” After documenting a plethora of other social ills, he concludes, “Nearly every one of the promises that were made by the architects and creators of liberalism has been shattered.”

Then he draws this surprising lesson: “Liberalism has failed—not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself.” By removing barriers and constraints on human behavior built by religious teaching and legal structures, it has freed us to be our fallen selves. And when my “will to power” collides with yours, conflicts abound, terrorists attack, wars are launched, and the weak are oppressed by the strong.

Being freed from “lifelong slavery”

What is the solution?

The Bible teaches that Jesus died to “destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery” (Hebrews 2:14–15). We are enslaved to our fear of death unless we are set free by a power greater than death. And no other person in human history demonstrated such power except Jesus Christ.

Muslims venerate the tomb of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina. I have been to the tomb of Baháu’lláh, the founder of the Bahá’í faith, and visited the graves of some of our culture’s greatest heroes, from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Winston Churchill and Sir Isaac Newton. None rose physically from the tomb. Even Lazarus and others whom Jesus raised from the dead eventually died again.

Only Jesus demonstrated the power to defeat the grave. Therefore, only he can give that power to us. When we receive the gift of eternal life that he offers all who trust in him, we are freed from “lifelong slavery” to death.

But there’s a downside to the upside.

Those of us who trust in Christ as our Lord know we will “never die” (John 3:16). But we can therefore feel free to pursue whatever we want in this life, secure in the knowledge that Jesus will forgive our sins when we confess them and that nothing we do in this world can keep us from the world to come. We can even believe that our religious activities will earn God’s favor and blessing on the non-religious areas of our lives.

All of this is but a spiritual expression of our fallen “will to power.” Such a compartmentalized way of life makes Jesus a means to our ends. By seeking what we want, we forfeit what he wants for us. This grieves our Father and impoverishes us since the will of an all-knowing, all-loving God is by definition better for us than ours.

“You lead, I follow”

The solution is the simple but transforming decision to “submit yourselves therefore to God” (James 4:7), to “humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God” (1 Peter 5:6) and to pray with Jesus, “Not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42).

In the words of a dear friend whose business and cultural influence spans the globe, it is to pray all through the day, “You lead, I follow.”

Dwight Moody counseled,

“Let God have your life; he can do more with it than you can.”

Do you agree?

Quote for the day:

“Carry the cross patiently, and with perfect submission; and in the end it shall carry you.” —Thomas à Kempis (1380–1471)

Our latest website resources:

• John Stonestreet on “Truth Rising” and courage in today’s culture
• Millionaire CEO goes viral for stealing a hat from a child
• Cable car crash in Lisbon kills 17, injures 21 others
• Is mining the moon in our future?
• Cracker Barrel, US division, Taylor Swift–Travis Kelce engagement & college football returns!

Denison Forum