The drama being played out between Hamas and the West grows stranger by the minute, exposing the cultural toxins that are weakening our resolve in the fight against jihad. The murderous aims of Hamas are clear, as their spokesmen and sympathizers do not hesitate to remind us. Nor is their commitment to jihad against Israel and the West a minority obsession of a lunatic fringe. Just recently the religious leaders of several Muslim countries issued a statement of support for the goal of Hamas to drive Israel into the sea: “The right to historical Palestine is an eternal right, and no soul can relinquish it, neither in an agreement, a document or a promise.” They added that nobody can ban “jihad for the liberation of Palestine” or “damn the jihadists.”

And contradicting those Westerners who still believe the whole crisis is about Palestinian nationalist aspirations, a Sudanese cleric said, “Palestine is a religious issue, not just a political one, and affects all Muslims.” A representative for Hamas agreed: “This meeting has reverted the Palestinian issue to its rightful depth as an Arab and Islamic issue.” The upshot of the declaration is that there will be no “land for peace,” no recognition of Israel’s right to exist, no signing on to “roadmaps” or other desperate Western attempts to avoid facing one simple fact: Israel is the beleaguered Western salient in the frontlines of the war against jihad.

Yet even as Hamas and the religious leadership of Muslim nations tell us their intentions, we Westerners refuse to listen...

...The most absurd response to the cut-off of funds to these terrorists, who want to destroy not just Israel but us as well, is that we are “punishing” the Palestinians for their democratic choice. We forget that the flip side to democratic choice is responsibility for that choice. During our own Civil War, Southerners made a democratic choice to secede from the Union and test their right to do so by force of arms. The Confederate soldiers in the field were sustained in their fight by the moral and material support of their families back home, who wrote them letters of encouragement, held public rallies and celebrations honoring them, and worked on farms and factories providing them with food and weapons.

General Sherman understood this dynamic between soldier and civilian, and conceived his March to the Sea as a psychological as well as military action: “I propose to demonstrate the vulnerability of the South and make its inhabitants feel that war and individual ruin are synonymous terms,” he wrote. So too in a letter to the mayor of Atlanta: “Now that war comes home to you, you feel very different. You deprecate its horrors, but did not feel them when you sent carloads of soldiers and ammunition, and molded shells and shot, to carry war into Kentucky and Tennessee, to desolate the homes of hundreds and thousands of good people who only asked to live in peace at their old homes, and under the Government of their inheritance.”...

...The war against jihad will never be won until Muslims themselves are convinced that jihad will fail. If there are indeed large numbers of moderate Muslims who want to adapt their religion to a modern, interconnected world run on principles of secular law and human rights, then they have to step up and act in ways that demonstrate this desire. But this will never happen until the West makes it clear that terrorist jihad in the pursuit of lost Islamic grandeur is a dead end that will bring only suffering and ruin. Unfortunately, in the case of Israel for forty years we have not only failed to show that the wages of jihad is death and failure, but we have indulged, subsidized, and rewarded terrorism. If one dime of Western money is sent to the Palestinians while an elected terrorist organization is in control, we will be doing so again.