Genocide is moral suicide
When cruelty is normalized, a people forfeit their soul and their claim to humanity.
By Muneeb Nasir
Since October 7, 2023, Israeli military operations in Gaza have escalated into what B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights–Israel now call plainly in their July 28, 2025 report Our Genocide: an intentional campaign of extermination against Palestinians.
The report documents what the world has seen: tens of thousands killed, including children.
Starvation used as a weapon.
Hospitals, schools, and homes destroyed.
Gaza’s food, water, and healthcare systems dismantled so that ordinary life—and survival itself—become impossible.
This is not collateral damage. It is policy.
Israeli leaders and military officials have spoken openly of their intent to “starve,” “eliminate,” and “raze Gaza to the ground.”
The brutality is not new—it is the culmination of decades of occupation, apartheid, and systematic dehumanization, accelerated after the Hamas attack when fear was weaponized to justify mass destruction and displacement.
Now, the report warns, these same patterns are spreading rapidly into the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
But genocide destroys more than its victims.
It corrodes the society that carries it out—and every nation that enables or excuses it.
When cruelty is normalized, empathy dies.
When mass killing is rationalized, future generations inherit a world where genocide becomes thinkable.
A society complicit in such crimes forfeits its claim to justice, conscience, and humanity itself.
All faith traditions have warned of this decay.
They call us to defend the stranger, love the neighbour, protect the vulnerable, and uphold mercy and fairness.
They remind us that every life carries dignity.
To lean toward oppression is to invite ruin.
As one proverb teaches: “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin condemns any people.”
Across traditions, the lesson is clear: a people who condone cruelty and the slaughter of innocents undermine their souls.
Injustice tolerated soon becomes injustice embedded.
Fear spreads, trust collapses, the vulnerable are abandoned, and the powerful act without restraint.
What is lost is not only faith in institutions, but the deeper bond of shared humanity that allows societies to endure.
The warning is stark.
Genocide does not only kill.
It rots the moral core of the perpetrators—and of those who remain silent.
To witness and do nothing is to join in the destruction of our shared humanity.
The choice before us is urgent.
We can look away, or we can resist cruelty.
We can excuse the inexcusable, or we can stand for justice and mercy.
Only the latter will preserve the soul of any society.