Failure of DEI Morality

On October 7, 2023, Hamas and allied militants launched a coordinated assault from Gaza into southern Israel. They murdered approximately 1,200 people—the large majority civilians—and took more than 250 hostages. The victims included attendees at the Nova music festival, residents of kibbutzim such as Be’eri, Kfar Aza, and Nir Oz, and people in their homes and cars. Documented acts included mass shootings, rape and sexual mutilation, beheadings, burnings of people alive, and the deliberate killing of infants and children. This was the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust.⁠

Three years later, the moral response to these facts still divides people. Some frameworks treat the attack as justified “resistance.” The Center for Human Equality stronglly rejects that conclusion. The moral system associated with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) has failed precisely because it replaces universal standards with group status.

Under that system, people are sorted into oppressor and oppressed classes. Those assigned the status of “oppressed” receive a practical exemption from ordinary moral rules. Their violence can be reframed as resistance, while the same acts by anyone else would be condemned as murder, rape, or terrorism. This is not equality. It is a hierarchy of moral permission based on identity.

The “Free Palestine” narrative supplies a clear illustration. In that framing, Palestinian Arabs are the oppressed and Israelis (especially Jewish Israelis) are the oppressors.

Once that binary is accepted, the right of the oppressed to “resist by any means” follows as a logical consequence. Civilian status becomes secondary or irrelevant. The deliberate targeting of non-combatants, the murder of babies, and sexual violence cease to be absolute moral prohibitions and become contextual tools. On the third anniversary of the attack, continued celebration or justification of Hamas’s actions under this logic remains morally repugnant. No legitimate moral system rooted in the equal dignity of persons can license the intentional slaughter of innocents solely because they belong to the disfavored group.

Universal moral principles do not operate this way.

The prohibition on murdering non-combatants, including children, is not conditional on the political status or historical grievances of the perpetrator. It applies to every human being. The same is true of rape, torture, and the desecration of bodies. These acts remain wrong whether committed by a state army, a terrorist organization, or any other actor. To suspend them for one group because that group has been labeled oppressed is to abandon universality. It substitutes a political ranking of victims and perpetrators for an ethic that holds every person accountable for his or her own choices.

This is the moral defect of the oppressor-oppressed model.

It judges people primarily by group membership rather than by individual action. Entire categories of people are treated as morally tainted or morally privileged before any particular deed is examined. The result is the opposite of equal treatment. Those placed in the oppressed category may commit the gravest crimes against the innocent and still claim moral cover; those placed in the oppressor category may be held collectively responsible for events they did not commit. Neither side is evaluated as unique persons with their own agency and responsibility.

The framework therefore cannot consistently condemn the October 7 massacre without contradicting its own premises. If “resistance by any means” is permitted, then the murder of festival-goers, the killing of children in their homes, and the rape of women are not moral crimes but political expressions. That conclusion is incompatible with any ethic that affirms the equal and inviolable worth of every human life.

Ethical Individualism, the human relational philosophy advanced by the Center for Human Equality, offers the necessary alternative. It begins from the premise that every human being possesses equal inherent dignity and is irreducibly unique. No person is to be reduced to a representative of a racial, ethnic, religious, or political category. Judgments are made on the basis of individual character and concrete actions, not on assigned group status.

Under this standard, the perpetrators of the October 7 atrocities are judged by what they did: they deliberately sought out and murdered civilians, including infants, and committed sexual violence as part of the attack. Their victims are likewise recognized as individual human beings whose lives were of equal value to any other lives. No political narrative supplies an exemption. The same rules apply to everyone.

Moral systems that claim legitimacy must be capable of condemning the intentional killing of children and the rape of civilians without special pleading. They must treat people as equals rather than as members of ranked classes. The DEI-derived binary of oppressor and oppressed fails that test.

By granting moral exemptions to the designated oppressed, it licenses barbarity against the innocent and then celebrates or excuses the result. On the third anniversary of the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, the only coherent response is to reject any framework that cannot name the October 7 massacre for what it was: an atrocity without moral justification.

Equality of respect requires that every person be held to the same standards. No group is entitled to murder the innocent.