The Wages of Conspicuous Compassion

Front Page Magazine ^ | May 28, 2025 | Bruce Thornton

[E. Pluribus Unum]

When we finance enemies who are sworn to our destruction.

One of the most feckless acts of “compassion” for the victims of a conflict has been the West’s decades-long provision of food, medicines, and other aid to Palestinian Arabs living in the Gaza Strip. These in-kind and cash donations come with an enormous moral hazard.

By now everyone knows that indeed the bulk of such aid is stolen by Hamas terrorists, who sell the goods and use the money to line the pockets of Hamas officials, pay their fighters, reward their “martyrs” killed while slaughtering mostly civilian Israelis, and buy weapons and missiles fired indiscriminately at civilian targets.  These funds are on top of the billions provided by the UN–– nearly $4.5 billion just from 2014 to 2020––and billions more from EU and Muslim nations.

Given that moral hazard, Israel is planning to let the U.S. Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and the IDF distribute the aid, removing Hamas and the UN from participating. In a display of their hatred of Israel, the Wall Street Journal reports, “Canada, the U.K. and France threatened Israel on Monday with ‘concrete actions’ unless it halts military operations and facilitates more aid, which ‘must include engaging with the UN’”––which recently spread the blood libel that Israel is preparing to starve to death 14000 babies in Gaza. Hamas sent Turtle Bay and the three “liberal democracies” a note of thanks.

This spectacle of Western nations libeling and browbeating Israelis into financing an enemy sworn to their destruction, and who ruthlessly targets civilians, including children, is another shameful marker of the decline of the West, especially the Europeans who morally preen about their “conspicuous compassion,” as Alan Bloom called such self-serving actions.

But in fact, such displays are morally idiotic camouflage for Europe’s failure...

[Lisbon1940]

Thorsten Veblen again?