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Moral people must learn how to hate
...I have heard all the arguments repudiating hate. Hatred is evil. It is the cause of all wars. It consumes the soul of he or she who hates. Silly arguments all. Hatred is only evil when it is directed at the good and at the innocent. It is positively Godly when it is directed at cold-blooded killers, motivating us to fight and eradicate them before more people die.

Hatred does not cause wars, it ends them. Because Churchill truly hated Hitler, he inspired a nation to put an end to his blitzkrieg conquests. The French, who did not hate Hitler, collaborated with him, instead. It is indifference to evil, rather than its hatred, that sends a message to the tyrants that they pick on anyone they like for the world will be silent.

He who does not hate Abu Musab al Zarkawi – a monster who shouts "God is great" while sawing off the heads of innocent human beings – is barely human themselves. Can a man love innocent victims without hating their tormentors? Loving victims might generate compassion for their suffering. But hating the perpetrators will generate action to stop their orgy of murder.

Which "moral" man or woman can lay claim to decency if they are not sickened to their stomachs by the likes of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden? Can a moral man have compassion for a dying Yasser Arafat when such love and compassion ought to be reserved exclusively for his victims? While innocence should evoke compassion, evil should evoke only contempt.

Bobby Frank Cherry, the Klansman who killed four black girls in a church bombing in Alabama in 1963, died last week in prison. On my radio show, I expressed my satisfaction that another evil man had perished from the earth. A black caller phoned in disgust. "I used to be like you, Shmuley," he said. "When I was a boy growing up in the segregated South, I hated the Klan so much that I wanted to be a sniper and shoot them. But as a Christian, I have worked my whole life to fight that hatred and get it out of my system."

I answered him:

What do you think God would prefer? That you use your energy to fight your hatred, or use your energy to fight evil? Now, no one would sanction your running around and indiscriminately shooting people, because that itself is immoral and illegal. That's not hatred. That's rage.

But it was due to prosecutors' odium for this man that they pursued him for almost 40 years, finally obtaining a conviction and sending him to prison just two years ago. If they had not detested him and his actions, he would have died peacefully at his home and the message would have gone out that you can get away with murder.

Hatred is not necessarily of the devil. Like any emotion, it is neutral, its morality determined solely by the object to which it is directed. ...