The recent videos of Hamas executing Palestinians in Gaza were horrifying. Yet anyone who witnessed the terror attacks of October 7, 2023 – when Hamas militants murdered, raped, and tortured Israeli civilians – should not have been surprised. The cruelty and joy of killing on display then are now turned inward, against their own people. Even the BBC,[1] CNN,[2] and other anti-Israel outlets have reported Hamas gunmen firing on unarmed men and carrying out public executions without trial or due process.

This is not new. During the war, Hamas executed Palestinians who tried to get food directly from American humanitarian convoys rather than through Hamas’s control.[3] Long before the current conflict, it murdered dissenters – often by throwing them from rooftops – for refusing to submit to its rule.[4] These acts of terror are not anomalies; they are central to the organization’s culture of violence and repression.

Predictably, UNRWA and the so-called “Palestinian Health Authorities” have issued no condemnation, no report, and no expression of outrage regarding Hamas’s reign of terror. The same institutions that loudly denounce Israel’s every move fall silent when the perpetrators are Hamas. Their credibility erodes each time moral judgment is applied selectively. Only now, as journalists gain direct access to Gaza and bypass Hamas’s information filters, are the world’s media beginning to report the truth.

Here on campus, that same selective morality has become painfully visible. The passionate protests that once filled MIT’s courtyards and lecture halls have vanished. No vigils, no open letters, no outrage over the summary execution of Gazans by Hamas. Even the recent ceasefire agreement, which offered a rare moment of relief for civilians on both sides, passed without comment. Where are the same voices that demanded “justice for Gaza”? are public executions not worthy of campus outrage? 

It may be uncomfortable for the slogan-shouting students and their faculty and staff enablers to look in the mirror and recognize who all their demonstrations were really supporting. The absence of any reaction to Hamas’s crimes suggests that the movement was never truly about sympathy for Gazans caught in the crossfire. Instead, it was an outlet for age-old antisemitism and its current anti-Zionism incarnation – an exercise in moral posturing by uninformed students and staff who practiced the age-old convictions directed at Jews. (The point is even more pronounced when one realizes the lack of campus demonstrations against the Chinese treatment of the (Muslim) Uyghurs, the gassing of hundreds of thousand Syrians by the Asad regimes, the genocide of Christians in Nigeria, and other atrocities.)

If outrage is expressed only when it can be directed at Israel, then it ceases to be moral at all. Outrage that ignores Hamas’s atrocities with silence is not solidarity. It is ideology masquerading as empathy. To condemn one set of crimes while excusing another undermines the very language of justice and compassion that our community claims to uphold.

At MIT, a place that prizes evidence and truth, we should hold ourselves to a higher standard. Moral consistency is not a political position – it is the foundation of integrity. Condemning Hamas’s crimes does not diminish concern for Palestinian suffering; it affirms it. It asserts that no movement can claim the mantle of human rights while turning a blind eye to murder and repression when committed by those it once championed.

If the campus movements that mobilized under banners of “liberation,” “human rights,” and “resistance” truly cared for Gazans, they would be protesting now. They would be demanding accountability from Hamas, welcoming the ceasefire (despite the fact that it was brokered by the “villain in DC”), and standing for the right of all civilians – Israeli and Palestinian alike – to live free from terror.

Instead, their silence exposes a deeper problem: selective outrage that weakens moral credibility. A double standard that condemns Israel, but excuses Hamas diminishes every genuine claim to justice.

True solidarity is not determined by who the victim is or who the perpetrator is. It is measured by the courage to confront evil wherever it occurs and to speak out, even when it challenges one’s preferred narratives.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c99g3p52k15o

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/15/world/video/hamas-killings-gaza-city-digvid

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-LjjY275_A

[4] https://www.hrw.org/report/2009/04/20/under-cover-war/hamas-political-violence-gaza

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