https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/23/suffer-the-little-children/
In his most powerful novel, Russia’s greatest 19th-century novelist wrestles with the most difficult moral problem faced by people – the suffering of innocents. At their father’s funeral, Ivan Karamazov recounts to his younger brother Alyosha, who is training to be a monk, graphic examples of sadistic acts committed against children.
“Imagine a trembling mother with her baby in her arms, a circle of invading Turks around her,” Ivan says. “They’ve planned a diversion: they pet the baby, laugh to make it laugh. They succeed, the baby laughs. At that moment a Turk points a pistol four inches from the baby’s face. The baby laughs with glee, holds out its little hands to the pistol, and he pulls the trigger in the baby’s face and blows out its brains.”
If evil exists in the world for the purpose of granting mankind free will, thereby revealing the existence of God, Ivan wants no part of religion. He also tells his brother of a married couple, “cultivated parents,” who subject their daughter to horrific beatings and torture and lock her in the outdoor privy in the freezing cold.
“Can you understand why a little creature, who can’t even understand what’s done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her?”
“The Brothers Karamazov” is fiction. But such horrors describe the real-life world we still live in. It was the world on display today when Hamas released the remains of four Israelis it kidnapped in the savage attack of Oct. 7, 2023. The oldest was Oded Lifshitz, who was 83 when abducted. Who takes an 83-year-old man?
The other three were members of a family whose names and likeness are familiar to everyone in Israel. They should have been known to everyone in the civilized world. Shiri Bibas was 32 when she was kidnapped by Hamas along with her red-headed sons, Ariel, then 4, and Kfir, who was not quite 9 months old. “Leave her alive, she has children with her,” one of the terrorists can be heard saying on a video they shot. “Let no one harm her so that they know of our humanity.”
Hamas’ idea of “humanity” was on full display Thursday in Gaza, as Hamas used the four dead hostages’ coffins as a grotesque prop, complete with their photographs and a photo of Benjamin Netanyahu rendered as a vampire. An inscription reads, “The war criminal Netanyahu and his Nazi army killed them with missiles from Zionist warplanes.”
There is, of course, no reason to believe these four people were inadvertently killed in an Israeli airstrike. It’s possible, but Hamas lies constantly about its crimes. It lies about its own hospitals being bombed, lies about casualty numbers, lies about food in Gaza, lies about hostages’ well-being, lies about everything. Its propaganda is as transparent as it is crude.
