RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hamas has announced what many have long suspected: Shiri Bibas and her two red-haired children, Ariel (5) and Kfir (2), all three of whom Hamas militants and their civilian allies kidnapped on October 7, 2023, are dead. Well, more than dead. Murdered.

Given the symbolic significance those once-smiling redheads have had in Israel, their deaths serve as an important touchpoint to understanding the world’s complete moral collapse. That collapse is evidenced in how the world’s institutions (governments, academia, and the media) have responded since October 7. And while societies can survive for quite some time despite institutional financial corruption, moral corruption is a different story—and, the Bible would say, moral corruption against the Jews will destroy societies. Even Israel is not free from this stricture.

On October 7, thousands of men from Gaza, whether official members of Hamas or the usual sadistic hangers-on that are rife in Muslim-Arab society, flooded into Israel. They targeted civilian enclaves—a music festival and kibbutzim where ordinary people lived—and killed over 1,200 people.

Image: Public domain

The invaders went out of their way to make the killings as sadistic as possible, torturing people to death, including mass rape of women and, it seems, men. Children were slaughtered in their cradles. In addition, Hamas & Co. seized 251 people, almost all civilians and many of whom were children, including those Bibas babies, and dragged them into Gaza.

Israel has since recovered 141 living hostages and 77 dead ones. The testimony of the living and the condition of the dead speak to terrible, Nazi-like torture. Hamas is set to return more hostages this weekend, including the bodies of Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas.

Israel responded to October 7 by going to war against Hamas. It did so with almost exquisite delicacy, taking the utmost care to protect Gaza civilians. As always, it telegraphed attacks in advance, destroying any advantage surprise might have given it and increasing the risk to its own troops. It shipped millions of tons of supplies to Gaza out of its sense of a moral obligation to feed civilians, despite knowing that Hamas was stealing most of the supplies—so Israel was provisioning its enemy. When it attacked Hamas’s main redoubt in Rafah, Israel arranged for civilians to leave.

Israel need not have bothered. It was still castigated as a genocidal killer. That was to be expected from the Muslim world and its fellow travelers, such as South Africa. But frankly, even those of us who knew that the West’s colleges and universities are morally empty leftist sinkholes were somewhat surprised by the sheer scope and volume of their support for Hamas, an institution open about its antisemitic genocidal intentions.

The world’s governments failed, too, including our own. Joe Biden, while paying lip service to supporting Israel, slow-walked weapons while openly sending hundreds of millions of dollars to Hamas, while covertly sending billions to that same entity, which happens to be on the official US terrorist list:

And, of course, the world’s media constantly tried to say that if Hamas is bad, Israel is worse, for Israel killed more people than Hamas did. In doing so, it completely ignored the distinction between targeting civilians, as Hamas always does, and targeting a military organization that deliberately embeds itself among civilians. The first is a moral outrage; the second is a tragedy of war, with the military that hides behind civilians bearing the moral responsibility for their deaths.

And with the murder of the Bibas family (for they were murdered, whether they were shot, stabbed, starved, or placed in a combat zone), that profound moral vacuum continues. Hamas has claimed that Israel killed the hostages, and the media accept that claim without question.

Just one example will suffice: CBS, once a respected news outlet that now believes that the Nazis’ power came from free speech and that Germany is saving democracy by silencing speech), has effectively said that Israel’s traditional warfare, waged with that exquisite concern about protecting enemy civilians, is the same as Hamas’s targeting and torturing civilians:

In a surprise announcement, a top Hamas leader said Tuesday that the U.S. and Israeli-designated terrorist group would release six living Israeli hostages on Saturday and the bodies of four others on Thursday, including the remains of the Bibas family, who for many Israelis have embodied the captives’ plight in Gaza.

Israel has said it is gravely concerned about Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir, but has not confirmed their deaths. Hamas said they were killed in an Israeli airstrike early in the war.

Kfir, who was 9 months old at the time, was the youngest hostage taken in the Hamas-orchestrated Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack that triggered the war in Gaza. Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza has killed more than 48,000 people, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in the Palestinian territory.

But you know who is at fault, too? Israel itself. Israel has allowed this genocidal hatred to fester within its borders for generations. It’s been so busy showing the world how good it is, despite the world’s refusing to acknowledge this effort, that it’s abandoned its first duty, which is to protect its people. As JD Vance would say, it’s failed to recognize its own ordo amoris (order of love). It’s become a pathological martyr, preferring its own death to self-defense against the evil that surrounds it.

As the world sinks ever further into an abyss of antisemitism, many would do well to remember God’s words to the Jews: “I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you…”

This has actually proven to be true throughout history. Societies that are good to Jews (relative to their time and place) have also been good to their own people and have thrived. Those who have cursed the Jews are abysmal places for all who live there.

Israel, which is more leftist in governance than it is religious, is not free from this stricture. Until she starts treating her own people better than she treats the killers around her, she will never be free of the worldwide antisemitic curse.