Americans and other Westerners often confuse the motivations of Hamas terrorists over a mistaken belief that terrorists and Americans generally think alike, Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro said.
Shapiro appeared on The Blaze in an interview that aired Wednesday evening with the network’s founder, Glenn Beck. Beck asked The Daily Wire co-founder about his thoughts on Israel’s war against Hamas and where the conflict might be headed.
Shapiro said that one of the major hurdles to an effective strategy to beat Hamas is the West’s misunderstanding of how the terrorists think and what motivates their actions. He said many Americans make a mistake when they assume that for Hamas terrorists to commit atrocities, they must have been severely victimized first.
“I think that we are so used to dealing with people around us who think like we think and act within the same general moral frame – even the people we think are, you know, our worst enemies in the United States act within the same kind of general moral frame, which is why we can theoretically have conversations with them,” Shapiro said.
“But this is something of a completely different kind. These are people who do not think like you. They do not act like you. They do not care about the same things that you care about. They operate in a completely different sphere,” Shapiro continued. “That sphere is a sphere in which babies can be beheaded and this is a moral thing to do, in which women can be raped and then kidnapped or murdered, a sphere in which the invasion of peaceful communities to slaughter innocents is considered an act of good and something that ought to be done on behalf of Allah.”
Shapiro said that Hamas, in some ways, is even worse than the Nazis that perpetrated mass genocide against Jews during World War II.
“At least the Nazis had the understanding that after World War II, as they were losing, they tried to cleanse the record in order to hide what they had done. In this particular case, it’s precisely the opposite. It’s Hamas taking active video of themselves beheading people, murdering, mutilating, raping, and then posting those to social media in order to generate both terrorism and also apparently sympathy in certain sectors of the world community,” Shapiro said.