We saw quite a spectacle this week, where Western leaders paid their respects to a known mass-murderer.
On X, photos and video have been shared of NATO, the UN, the EU and the US Senate all paying respects to the late Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi. The UN held a moment of silence, while the chaplain of the Senate offered a prayer for those in Iran praying for the late president. It was quite a debased spectacle, and one should ask how it came to be.
Raisi’s record is no secret. He apparently held a patent for the five minute trial, where he would summarily find someone guilty of crimes against the revolution and sentence him or her to death. The “Butcher of Tehran” has been accused of sending as many as 30,000 people to their deaths at the beginning of the revolution. We know that Iranian-supplied IEDs killed hundreds of US soldiers in Iraq. What Iran’s role in 9/11 may have been is up for debate, from active assistance to merely letting the terrorists pass through its territory. A federal court found Iran liable for damages suffered by plaintiff victims. Various reports claim that 500 10/7 terrorists received training from Raisi’s forces in Iran prior to the pogrom. Dozens of Americans have won terror lawsuits against Iran in the US and are looking to fulfill their multimillion-dollar judgments.
So if Mr. Raisi was so evil and the president of a truly evil regime, why did our leaders—including the White House—offer condolences or show respect for this person? Social media is full of Iranians, Gazans, and others celebrating Raisi’s death. I am not suggesting handing out candy as the Palestinians did on 9/11 or jumping for joy, but why didn’t the West simply stay silent, as some have suggested. Israel put out no formal statement and many other countries also said nothing—neither praises nor condemnations for a truly evil human being.
The reason why the West could waste a minute of silence on a mass murderer or offer prayers on his behalf is that in a highly secular world, there can be no fixed definition of evil—or good for that matter. The Torah tells us who the Jews’ bad guys are and also gives us heroes like Moses, his brother Aaron, and the great sages throughout the generations. Churchill and Roosevelt could easily define the Nazis and the Japanese as evil based on known reports of their behavior and it being contrary to values universally held in the West at that time. It was said that the Bataan Death March figured prominently in Truman’s decision to use the atomic bombs on Japan. Knowing good and evil allows one to strengthen the former while fighting the latter. Democracy does not define good and evil. It is simply 50% + 1. If the people want to burn all of the red shirts in a town, then they can vote to do so. Definitions of good and evil can only come from religion or some other moral or philosophical source of personal conduct outside of any system of government. As nations become more secular, we have a harder time saying with absolute certainty what is evil, and also what is good.
Look no further than the college campuses to see the above-stated principle in action. Students dress up as Hamas terrorists or wave Hezbollah flags. The fact that Hamas is an Islamist movement that kills homosexuals and reduces women to chattel is irrelevant to these bored students. Independent of 10/7, Hamas is evil in that they are murderers, they ruled Gaza through violence and intimidation, and their treatment of women would be appalling by all modern standards. Forget about Israel. Our highly-educated students should be protesting Hamas for being such an evil group, but they are not. They are not asking for two states. They are not criticizing Hamas for what it filmed itself doing on 10/7. No, rather they want to be Hamas. They know that Hamas would kill all of the members of “Queers for Palestine” or cover Western women head-to-toe should they come to visit. They are not moved by these realities. They have no moral system that demands that they call Hamas evil. Jews and Israel, on the other hand, because their professors taught them that they are necessarily oppressors, can receive no praise or support. They will always be hounded as evil, no matter how much good they do. The Jews who are accosted on campus: does anyone ever bother to ask them their political views on Israel or the military response to 10/7? No, because it does not matter. Jews are at the bottom of the intersectionality oppressor chart along with whites, so they can only be evil. In this example, we have not just an inability to define truly good and evil but rather have created a full inversion when compared to the reality of what happened on 10/7.
Just as the West can praise a ruthless dictator, it can also scorn good. In the past, marriage and bringing children into the world were accepted as religious (“Be fruitful and multiply”) good. Today, marriage rates are dropping and birth rates in Western countries as well as Japan and China have fallen off a cliff. Patriotism was seen as a great good; today, not so much. Much of the crime we see today—people being “randomly” stabbed, punched or pushed in front of oncoming trains—is an outcome of generations without any moral training that would make such behavior evil in the eyes of its perpetrators. A moral compass pointing the wrong way or simply spinning around endlessly cannot help a person define evil that needs to be fought or good that needs to be pursued and strengthened. Homeless people on the streets and fentanyl flowing through the open southern border are just two of the outcomes of leaders that don’t realize that much of their job is to maximize the good of their constituents.
Good and evil can only be defined through moral systems. When there are no fixed moral standards, the White House can send its condolences for someone who killed American G.I.’s by the bushel. The UN can hold its anti-Israel tongue for one whole minute to show its respect for a person who murdered enemies of the Islamic revolution. Oct. 7 and Raisi’s death have shown the moral rot when secularism cannot provide working definitions of good and evil as religious systems once did. We are fortunate that we fought the Axis powers when people could still understand that evil needed to be crushed and not praised.