You're listening to Breakpoint This Week where we're talking about the top stories of the week from a Christian worldview.

Today we're talking about the attack on Israel by Hamas and why so many people fail to recognize evil when they see it.

We also discuss the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine and why there's so much more at stake here than land.

We're looking forward to our time together today. Thanks for joining us.

Welcome to Breakpoint This Week for the Colson Center for Christian World View. I'm Shane Morris here with John Stone Street president of the Colson Center for Christian World View and host of Breakpoint.

John, it seems like every time I come on Breakpoint to fill in for Maria, it's an extreme of good news or bad news.

Last time I joined you, we talked about the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Dobs decision had just come down and that was a day of just enormous rejoicing in the midst of our analysis of that decision

and what it means for the pro-life movement moving forward. Well today we're dealing with an extreme piece of bad news, a display of evil last weekend in Israel when Hamas terrorists breached the border of Israel from Gaza and began just slaughtering civilians.

As we speak, the death toll has topped 1200 Israeli lives lost and at least 100 hostages taken by Hamas.

This was just an unreal episode to watch unfold. I couldn't believe the level of violence and the instantaneous access to that violence that we were getting via social media, but one thing that immediately came across my mind as I watched it unfold, especially as I watched Ben Shapiro with the Daily Wire covered it and just shared some of the worst scenes and photographs and images and it's important to note that these were being put out primarily by the men perpetrating them.

They weren't aftermath being seen by victims or Israeli soldiers. They were actually posted on the Facebook pages, on the Instagram pages of the men who were perpetrating the acts and then some of them by the victims after they picked up their phones shortly after slaughtering them. So it was just an unreal thing to watch.

Well, yeah, and more and more details continue to emerge, but let me begin by saying yes and welcome back, Shane. I had someone just as recently as a couple weeks ago, stop me at an event where I was speaking and say, I really like Shane. What happened to him? So anyway, you're missed even after all these years. It's good to have you here. Maria, I think is in France. She hasn't mentioned that at all to the rest of us that she was going to France, but I think that she is and I'm sure there's going to be some conspiracy theorist about, you know, we bring you in for the big news.

Look, I woke up Saturday morning, I usually do a quick scan of the headlines. And of course, this was dominating every news outlet, you know, traditional and social media feeds and everything else. And it's only gotten worse since what has now been confirmed is not just the videos of paragliders and the music festivals, but what happened afterwards?

Things that we haven't associated with modern warfare, you know, really, and certainly in my lifetime and beyond. It is an old story. The past thing is really conflict. It is an old story. The evils of Hamas and Hamas's desire to attack Israel and really eradicate Israel. And that's just one of the many groups that surround that nation that have stated that desire in the past.

But it was just so shocking how successful this attack was in the sense of preaching the border, getting overwhelming the iron dome. That's what you didn't expect. In fact, there is plenty of research and I think reckoning to be done there. Like, what happened? Is it, you know, 912 going, you know, we were asleep. And that's how this happened. And we shouldn't have been asleep, right? And there's been a lot of reckoning.

There's not a lot of reckoning that's happened between the CIA and the FBI and the lack of communication and, you know, no shortage of books or anything like that. There'll be something like that here. But one of the things to remember is on a proportionate level. And it's, when you're talking about horrific evils like this, attacks on women, attacks on children, it's not an addition problem, right? It's not that more necessarily equals worse. But the scale here is something that is a factor.

It's remarkable. I mean, it's, it's about 10 times on a proportionality in terms of the numbers given the size of Israel versus the size of America. It's about 10 times the number of casualties as happened at 911. And of course, that doesn't even take into consideration over 100 Israelis that now have been kidnapped and taken to Hamas and Gaza, including women and children.

And the stories of the children, I think, are what have so much of the world reeling and have, honestly, for a lot of people who have been pretty committed to a narrative that Israel is the, you know, the bad actor in this whole story, you know, that's changed the narrative for a lot of people.

You know, there's a distinction to be made between Hamas and Palestine and Palestinians. But my goodness that the absolute barbarity here is the thing that I think has people reeling.

We have this Christopher Nolan movie Oppenheimer come out recently. And of course, it was about the invention of nuclear weapons and the first use of nuclear weapons. And one of the things that I know the film highlights is Oppenheimer's horror at what happened with his technology.

What was done with the discoveries that he made, you know, that's a really tough conversation to have. But with something like a nuclear weapon, you're talking about like instantaneous annihilation. And it's a very impersonal thing too. That was true throughout World War Two with the bombing of Dresden, for instance, with any time you do carpet bombing or fire bombing, it's a very indiscriminate, but very impersonal thing. You never see the victims. You don't look people in the eyes as you kill them.

This was on a whole different level in terms of being personal in terms of being a direct and inhuman set of atrocities. We're looking at I was listening to the world and everything in it this morning as we record this and the death toll among the Israelis at this point is somewhere around 1200 initially we were hearing, you know, just a few hundred.

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