I genuinely thought prominent voices would be done arguing that a baby murdered in such a way as to leave the child headless doesn’t mean the murderers should be accused of beheading. This was an actual argument being made last week by such mini-eminences as Eric Levitz of New York magazine. I was wrong.

But Zeynep Tufekci’s column in—where else?—the New York Times today actually serves as a teachable moment for another aspect of the debate over Hamas’s monstrous October 7 slaughter: Why the barbarity itself matters.

The conceit of Tufekci’s column is not merely an echo of the fictional Dr. House’s line that “everybody lies.” It is that maintaining an attitude of skepticism is rational even after the facts are known. And Tufekci doesn’t merely express doubt that babies made headless have been beheaded. She also discusses the blast near a hospital for which her newspaper falsely accused Israel of responsibility. “It is certainly possible that the hospital may have been accidentally hit by a missile fired in Gaza,” she writes—of a hospital that we now know indisputably was accidentally hit by a missile fired in Gaza.

The terrorists are on tape discussing the misfire, but yeah, who knows. She reports that in 2014, Israel claimed its strike on a Gaza beach was targeting Hamas terrorists, but then a journalist from the New York Times insisted that the structure that was hit “does not seem like the kind of place frequented by Hamas militants.” And so, Tufekci writes, “One can see how this history plays out in the global upheaval over the Hamas claim two weeks ago that an Israeli missile struck a hospital courtyard in Gaza.”

What is truth, anyway, right? After all, in 1990, Tufekci writes, a Kuwaiti teenager falsely testified that Iraqi soldiers took babies out of incubators and left them to die. And then, before you knew it, the first Gulf War was on.

Tufekci’s belief in the subjective nature of truth aside, the Kuwait example is the crux of her argument: “The shocking fabrication played a key role in the effort to sell the war to the reluctant American public,” she writes. “Needing to make sure oil fields stayed in the hands of the rulers of a tiny country created by colonial powers in the early 20th century went only so far. Opposing an army so savage that it commits the most unthinkable crimes is a more convincing appeal for war.”

Yes, so a country swallowing up another country, as Iraq did to Kuwait, that really wasn’t much of a thing, nor was the fact that a coalition of 42 nations joined together to reverse Iraq’s actions. It was all because of a baby-incubator story.

But there is another important point hidden in the miasma of Tufekci’s column: The particular method of mass killing is, in fact, relevant when it comes to the question of whether the world must take responsibility and respond.

In 2013, the Obama administration announced that Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime had crossed the administration’s own “red line” by unleashing the horrors of chemical weapons against innocents. Crossing that line was supposed to mean that the U.S. would strike Syria in retaliation. Barack Obama had Susan Rice, his national security advisor, publicly explain why the U.S. had to take military action in response to poison gas when it did not take such action after Assad’s forces killed innocents with conventional weapons.

Chemical weapons, Rice said, “are wholly indiscriminate.” In addition, “The torturous death they bring is unconscionable.” Their use challenges the credibility of all the nations that committed to keeping such weapons off the battlefield. And the security of America and its allies is at stake. Rice went on: “Failing to respond means more and more Syrians will die from Assad’s poisonous stockpiles. Failing to respond makes our allies and partners in the region tempting targets of Assad’s future attacks. Failing to respond increases the risk of violence and instability as citizens across the Middle East and North Africa continue to struggle for their universal rights. Failing to respond brings us closer to the day when terrorists might gain and use chemical weapons against Americans abroad and at home.”

Then Obama got cold feet and betrayed the very idea he had championed, but that is a shameful story for another day.

“The torturous death they bring is unconscionable,” Rice said of chemical weapons, and the same is true of the Hamas slaughter—and the use of these tactics without a response that would deter their future use will only increase the likelihood that these attacks will be repeated. And not only against Israel. As I explained yesterday, terrorist groups compete for attention and renown, which translates into an increase in recruits and funding streams, which then makes them more capable of repeating or even outdoing the original attacks. It also means other groups throughout the world will respond with their own bids for attention and renown. What works will be repeated elsewhere.

And that is true even if a New York Times columnist doesn’t believe it ever happened.