How to Face Evil?

My first thought about fighting evil happened about ten years ago. An idea came to me: how about trying to get rid of Marxism? According to some estimates [1], Marxism was responsible for the death of one hundred million innocent lives worldwide. At the time this seemed a worthy project. 

Several months later God gave me a passage. Matthew 12:43 “When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. 44 Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. 45 Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation.” This parable should be easy to understand. If you remove an evil spirit without cleaning the house, more spirits, possibly worse ones, will come to occupy the house. Therefore, fighting Marxism alone will not work. Therefore, I gave up this goal. 

One or two years later, I saw a documentary about how Saddam Hussein became Iraq’s dictator. He was more wicked than Mao or Stalin, not in terms of the number of innocent killed but in his brutal approach. One example. In the meeting of Parliament to determine Iraq’s leader, Saddam had guards loyal to him standing at the entrance. As soon as anyone questioned his authority, he would have him escorted by guards to the outside. Soon after, gunshots were heard by all attendants. I guess that everyone understood the message at once. Saddam was elected the leader unopposed. 

Separately, Syrian father and son dictators Assad ruthlessly suppressed any dissent. As it turns out, Assad and Saddam belong to the same party: Ba'ath Party. The ideology of  Ba'ath Party is a mixture of Islamists, Nazis, and Communists [2].  

After the Oct.7 terrorist attack, I did some research. Hamas is as evil as ISIS (could be worse) [3,4]. Where did this evil come from? In ideology, Hamas is a direct descendant of Islamists and Nazis. The details see [3]. 

Now what? As you can see, ideologies worse than Communism exist. How should we fight or handle evil? As it turns out, the Bible is clear on this. I will address it in my next write-up. 

References: 

1. https://www.victimsofcommunism.org/ 

2. Bernard Lewis, "Faith and Power: Religion and Politics in the Middle East," Oxford University Press, 2010. 

3. Israel Gaza: Hamas raped and mutilated women on 7 October, BBC hears

4. Sheryl Sandberg: Screams Before Silence Film

5. Silence over Hamas hate shames our politicians CLAIRE LEHMANN AU 10-13, 2023 p11

….. The ideology of Hamas – the terrorist organisation that carried out the attacks on October 7 – fuses Islamism with Nazism ……. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and leader of the Palestinian Arab nationalist movement, Amin al-Husseini, joined forces with the Nazis. ….  Al-Husseini met with Adolf Hitler and other Nazi officials, and helped establish a Muslim wing of the Schutzstaffel (SS). In a German propaganda newsreel shared by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, you can watch Hitler declare the “struggle against a Jewish homeland in Palestine” was part of the “struggle against the Jews”. And that when the German army had extended all the way to the Middle East, Germany would issue “an assurance to the Arab world that the hour of liberation was at hand”. It would then be al-Husseini’s “responsibility to unleash the Arab action that he has secretly prepared”. 

After the war, al-Husseini escaped prosecution for war crimes, but he was welcomed into Eqypt as a hero. “Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin Al-Husseini will continue the struggle,” wrote the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna.

Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Today’s Hamas militants are the ideological descendants of al-Husseini, the Nazi collaborator who plotted with Hitler to eradicate the Jews. …