The effort to bully Americans into co-signing this carnage, framed as a necessary strike against Hamas terrorists (whom Israel itself has funded and empowered), is not merely a geopolitical maneuver. It is a direct assault on the heart of Christianity's 2,000-year legacy: the personhood revolution inaugurated by Jesus Christ. This campaign to normalize the massacre of the vulnerable will not succeed, however. The world today is too Christ-haunted, too saturated with the moral power of the victim, for such a repeal to take hold. Instead, it will backfire, exposing the fragility of empires built on scapegoating and violence. The Gaza crisis is a crucible, testing whether the West will embrace its Christian roots or reject them at its own peril.

On October 23, 2017, The American Conservative published my reflection (https://aneighborschoice.com/our-shocking-acceptance-of-state-sanctioned-violence/) on state-sanctioned violence, where I recounted a courtroom exchange that stunned a jury: "Why would I put a human being in a cage for using a blue pen? That is a nonviolent act and there is no victim." The same question echoes now in Gaza's smoldering ruins. Why would we endorse the slaughter of innocents to punish the guilty? The logic of collective punishment, of bombing schools and hospitals to "root out" Hamas, is the logic of the archaic sacred, where scapegoats were sacrificed to appease communal rage. This is the pre-Christian order Jesus dismantled when He stood in the place of the victim, exposing the lie that violence against the innocent can restore harmony. Yet today, powerful voices—politicians, pundits, and even some Christian leaders—demand we cheer for this bloodshed, as if Christ's revelation never happened.

René Girard, the late Stanford professor whose mimetic theory I've long drawn upon, taught us that human societies are built on the scapegoat mechanism. We channel our rivalries and fears into violence against a designated "other," believing their destruction will unify us. In Gaza, this mechanism is laid bare. Hamas's atrocities on October 7, 2023, were indefensible, but Israel's response—blockading, invading, and bombing with a death toll that includes thousands of children—has turned Palestinians into the West's latest scapegoat. The narrative is familiar: "They" are the problem; "their" suffering is collateral damage; "we" must stand united in our righteous cause. This is the old pagan script, not the Gospel.

Christianity, through Jesus' life, death, and resurrection, upended this script. The Cross revealed the victim as innocent, the mob as complicit, and the state's violence as a sham. Mary's Magnificat sings of this revolution: God scatters the proud, lifts the lowly, and defends the vulnerable. To co-sign Gaza's bombing is to reject this song, to objectify Jesus as a mere symbol rather than the living truth who demands we see the personhood in every human face, especially the suffering. It is an attempt to repeal Christianity itself, to return to a world where might makes right and the weak are expendable.