World War II began in Europe after Nazi Germany invaded its neighbors in a war of elimination. For months before, European officials sought to appease and contextualize. They legitimized German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler’s grievances by seeking to negotiate them away, never recognizing that the territorial disputes Hitler cited were cover for an ideology upon which he would never compromise.

So it is with Hamas. Diplomats seek compromise, counsel negotiation, and assume the problem is occupation. Some forget that Israel left Gaza in 2005 and that vital statistics show Gazans score better in key health and welfare metrics than Pakistanis, Brazilians, or Azerbaijanis. Western activists preach international law but forget that, legally, Hamas has no right to be in the Gaza Strip — the Oslo Accords predicated the Palestinian Authority on an acknowledgment of Israel’s right to exist and an agreement to forswear terror. Any negotiation with Hamas would validate its rejection of previous agreements, dooming the one prerequisite diplomacy needs to work.

These same diplomats and intellectuals ignore not only the genocidal ideology enshrined in the Hamas Covenant but also the antisemitism that has become a virtue among both hardliners and reformers in the Iranian regime. Hamas’s Covenant defines the goal of Hamas as “to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.” To do this requires the destruction of Israel. Hamas explains, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.”

The real irony is that, as diplomats seek to engage Hamas, the group belittles diplomats and diplomacy. “Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences are in contradiction to the principles of Hamas,” the group’s founding document reads. “Those conferences are no more than a means to appoint the infidels as arbitrators in the lands of Islam. … There is no solution for the Palestinian problem except by Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are but a waste of time, an exercise in futility.”

Some American professors argue that declarations that Iranian leaders meant to “wipe Israel off the map” were the result of journalist mistranslation, but Iranian banners and the Iranian government’s own translations make clear that genocide against Jews is the goal. While former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami charmed Western officials with talk of a “Dialogue Among Civilizations,” he took a different tone on Iranian television. “If we abide by human laws, we should mobilize the whole Islamic world for a sharp confrontation with the Zionist regime. If we abide by the Quran, all of us should mobilize to kill,” he explained in 2000.

Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah took things a step further when he told Lebanon’s Daily Star that the battle would not end with Israel’s conquest. ”If [the Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide,” he explained.

Such sentiments illustrate the moral inversion now at play on the streets of European capitals and American university campuses. Five years ago, I questioned whether the United Kingdom’s Labour Party had effectively become a hate group under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. His successor, Keir Starmer, has pulled Labour back from the brink, but its blindness to the hate Islamist groups and regimes profess continues to find fertile ground within the party and the media.

Consider Guardian columnist Chris McGreal, who complained, “The language being used to describe Palestinians is genocidal.” By his logic, the language President Franklin D. Roosevelt and U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill used against Germany during World War II would constitute incitement to genocide, and the disproportionate warfare employed to eliminate the Nazi menace would constitute genocide.

Diplomacy is ineffective against ideologues who see it as an asymmetric warfare strategy to deploy against the naive. Excising the cancer that Hamas represents requires violence. International law does not require proportionality, nor do the Geneva Conventions apply to those who, like Hamas, reject the behavioral preconditions necessary to qualify for its protections.

Germany is now a thriving democracy because the Allies forced its unconditional surrender. They did not grow squeamish, even as fighting turned to urban warfare. Almost 80 years later, humanitarians may howl, but morality and ethics are not on their side.

Peace will only occur when every Hamas member, like Nazis and Islamic State militants before them, lies dead, rots in prison, or flees into ignominious exile.