This year, the globe was reminded of the heavy and following evil that has wormed its way to the center of Arab political culture by the news that the Bibas family — a mother, Shiri, a 4-year-old boy, Ariel, and his 9-month-old brother, Kfir— who had been kidnapped again to Gaza on Oct. 7 had in fact been murdered. Hamas held the corpses prisoner, and in exchange received the launch of imprisoned Arab terrorists, and they are returning their bodies to Israel this month.
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It is informative to understand the conditions of the Bibas mother’s theft. They were not, in truth, kidnapped by identified members of Hamas. They were abducted by Palestinians dressed as civilians who later joined Hamas in their violent rampage. Zero Palestinians worked to keep the Bibas home comfortable or allow them to return to liberty for more than a year.
This fits into a pattern of human involvement in Arab terrorist activity: in reality, the Palestinian civil population is ingrained into the Israeli terror apparatus. That is why the Arab hostages who have been freed are able to tell of being held by human families in Gaza, why terrorists can’t get away from the population and why Israeli terrorist organizations have a booming following in general. In areas like the Gaza Strip, the painful distinction between a terrorist and a human that is so dearly revered by the West is simply indisputable.
Israel has accepted the moral duty to differentiate between terrorists and human goals with more success than any other nation in the history of conflict, achieving a roughly 1: 1 terrorist-to-civilian-death amount in the heavily industrial Gaza Strip. However, it is crucial to acknowledge that the Palestinian separatist movement is itself poisoned with malignancy: that it is driven no by a need for an independent state to emerge side-by-side by Israel, as the fabled two-state remedy has now suggested for decades, but by a wish for the total annihilation of Israeli life in the Middle East.
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Again, Israeli civilians kidnapped and held children. Then they held their dead hostage in order to free the violent Palestinian terrorists. Oct. 7 was not a “jailbreak”, an attempt to achieve flexibility or social autonomy, it was, simply put, a murder, designed to kill as many Jews as possible and incite a multifront conflict that would eliminate the State of Israel in toto — or, in the lack of such an achievement, to organize world support to remove Israel for defending itself.
Hamas and its allies found admirers on the Western left for this latter mission. They were aware that such support would be forthcoming: The Western left has held the view that deliberately murdering babies is acceptable in order to suppress the rebellion of supposedly oppressed people. Frantz Fanon, saint of the Third World left, said as much:” In its bare reality, decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives…. For the native, life can spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler”. In his introduction to Fanon’s obscene” The Wretched of the Earth,” Jean-Paul Sartre argued that the only way for the West to end its bloodshed was to kill two birds with one stone. To do this, both an oppressor and the man he oppresses simultaneously: there remain a dead man and a free man.
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Israel is not actually a colonizing power because Jews have predominated there for almost two millennia. However, the left’s decolonization narrative only needs a supposedly victimized population to be identified by their level of poverty and stagnation, which is required by its logic. For the left, it is irrelevant if poverty and stagnation are the result of terrible choices made for decades by the very people who now claim victim status: People are immediately deemed victimized if they are angry and violent. These pseudo-victims must be more justified because they must be more angrier, violent, and successful than their opponents.
This is evil. You are supporting evil if you support those who purposefully kidnap babies and hold them for a ransom. You are supporting evil if you demand concessions from those who commit such atrocities. We can see who is at odds with evil from college campuses to the streets of London, from the United Nations to the International Criminal Court. We should be reminded that those who support evil also suffer the same moral consequences as Israel places the bodies of the Bibas family.
