Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS, Feb. 20, 2025
“These latest instances of Palestinian Arab barbarism, however, are not one-offs or outliers.”
Avoiding generalizations about groups of people is almost always wise. In doing so, we avoid the snares that can lead to prejudicial conclusions that cause us to forget that even those who differ from us in many ways have a common humanity. When people refer to opponents of any kind by saying that “they” (whoever the “they” might be) ”are all alike” and therefore bad, we know they are usually telling us far more about themselves than anything else.
And yet, as much as we might wish it not to be so, there are occasions when groups do exhibit loathsome behavior that are a clear illustration of their beliefs and values.
Over the last month, the Palestinian Arabs have done just that during ceremonies as part of the release of hostages they took on Oct. 7, 2023. Their celebrations of that orgy of mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction reached a new low this week when they turned over the remains of four murdered hostages: Oded Lifshitz, 83 when he was taken; Shiri Bibas, 32; and her little sons, Ariel, age 4; and Kfir, only 9 months old when kidnapped. However, testing later showed that the body that was supposed to be Shiri was, in fact, not her. That was just one more act of cruelty to add to so many others committed by the Palestinians.
The handover of their coffins, which reportedly stated the time of their “arrest” by Hamas terrorists and civilians who followed them into the Israeli communities that were devastated by their attack, was a wild celebration, complete with loud happy music and cheering throngs of Palestinians….SOURCE
The Death of the Bibas Family Is a Stain on the Human Conscience
Brendan O’Neill
Spiked, Feb. 20, 2025
“The crime against humanity visited on the Bibas family did not only expose the depthless cruelty of Hamas – it also exposed the moral disorder of the West.”
They kidnapped a baby. A mob of anti-Semites stole a nine-month-old baby from his home. They filmed the abduction, so proud were they of their besieging of this innocent infant. They published the footage online for other Jew-haters to salivate over. It showed the baby with his face buried into his mother’s breast. Mum’s face is etched with terror as she holds both her baby and her four-year-old tight to her chest: a small and extraordinary act of maternal heroism in the face of the swarming pogromists. ‘Look what we did’, the filmers of this crime essentially said: ‘We humiliated a baby Jew.
It can feel hard sometimes to fathom the wickedness of Hamas, to map the depths of its anti-Jewish cruelty. But it is distilled for us in this image. In these scenes of the terror-stricken young Bibas family being violently dragged from their home for the ‘crime’ of their Jewishness. This is Hamas. This is its ‘resistance’ that the privileged of the West celebrated. It abducts mothers and children. It holds a baby prisoner. Its hatred for Jews is so fervid and zealous that it sees even a nine-month-old Jew as an enemy, a ‘coloniser’, as something less than human.
The kidnapping of the Bibas family was one of the great war crimes of our age. Mother Shiri and her two sons – Ariel, aged four at the time, and Kfir, then just nine months old – were taken from their home in the Nir Oz kibbutz during the fascistic onslaught of 7 October 2023. They hid in a safe room when they heard the army of anti-Semites approach. Dad Yarden left the safe room to try to distract the mob of Jew-haters and save his family. He was kidnapped, then the family was kidnapped. In the cruellest twist, Yarden survived – he was released from Hamas’s captivity earlier this month – but Shiri, Ariel and Kfir perished at some point during their internment by the Islamo-fascists.
The Muslim World Speaks: Hamas Must Meet Its End
Qanta A. Ahmed
Times of Israel, Feb. 23, 2025
“October 7 stains the Palestinian people with a broad brush, and permanently so. Your terror, your barbarity, your monstrous zeal leave a permanent brand not only on Israel and the Jew, but on each of you.”
Though I am not Israeli, and I am not Jewish, the anguish of the Bibas family is mine. I am devastated by the return of the bodies, the babies’ remains separated from those of their mother, which Hamas withheld for a further day. These are the most agonizing events since that October 7th day.
This unforgivable crime, perpetrated on infant Jews and their mother, clarifies to the world the depravity of Hamas and the Palestinian civilians who abducted them. That this act was only one amid thousands of acts perpetrated with zeal, ecstasy and abandon on October 7 remains incomprehensible.
Walking through devastated home after home in October 2023, I followed the footsteps of the dead. I moved slowly, methodically, examining the scenes of murder, torture, sexual violation and abduction. Later, I spent hours with Dr. Chen Kugel and Dr. Nurit Bulbit at Abu Kabir (Israel’s National Forensic Center in Jaffa) where I witnessed autopsies of the murdered, and, as a physician, examined the anatomy of lethal, genocidal Islamism.