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ISRAEL

The Roots of the Palestinian Sickness The West’s embrace of Hamas’s brutality is no accident—it was carefully cultivated over decades by intellectuals who legitimized atrocities under the guise of “resistance.” By Stephen Soukup

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/22/the-roots-of-the-palestinian-sickness/

This week, as the civilized peoples of the West once again recoil in horror at the grotesque and violent spectacle that is Hamas, it is worth remembering that the bloody, brutal, and depraved character of the Palestinian animosity toward Israel and the Jewish people did not arise from natural circumstances. The blind and merciless hatred the radical Palestinians feel toward Israel is neither normal nor accidental. It was carefully and purposefully cultivated over the course of nearly a century and has been intentionally intensified and amplified by the intellectual discourse in Europe and the United States.

The monstrous treatment of the Bibas family—the kidnapping and murder of an innocent woman and her two small children, the parading of the corpses through a celebratory rally, the apparent attempts to hide the real causes of the children’s death, and the utter refusal to return the remains of their mother, Shiri—is not the behavior one would ever expect from a conventional regime, even one that bills itself as the “resistance” to an “occupying” force. Rather, it is behavior consistent with the ugliest, vilest, most brutal sects man has ever known—the Nazis, Lenin and Stalin’s Soviets, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, and so on. This is no mere coincidence. The Palestinian/Hamas-nik consciousness springs from many of the same sources as the most horrific regimes of the twentieth century.

Nowhere in the world have the anti-realist philosophies of cultural Marxism been more ingrained and more destructive than in the discourse around and the practical politics of the Middle East. Arab nationalism was an early 20th-century identity movement that surfaced amidst the dying of the Ottoman Empire and which was patterned in many ways on the German nationalist undertaking. The early thinkers and founders of Arab nationalism looked to define themselves and their people and to build an independent pan-Arab state that stretched, essentially, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Sea. The identity the Arab nationalists created for themselves and the Arab people was defined principally in terms of who the Arabs were not, rather than who they were. And who they were not is European colonialists.

In this sense, the Arab Nationalist movement was quintessentially postmodern. It arose in opposition to the “truth” of Western cultural hegemony and obsessed over the sins and perceived slights of the colonial powers—including the Zionists. It fashioned for itself a majestic yet “lost” past of the Arab people. And it sought to restore that past through opposition to the prevalent ideas of Western liberalism.

Additionally, and more to the point, the Middle East as it exists in the mind of the Western intellectual or wannabe intellectual today is largely the creation of a narrative that was fashioned more than five decades ago, in the fevered imagination of a literary theorist named Edward Said. Said was ostensibly a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University. But he was also the man most responsible for the current Western-liberal view of the Middle East and especially of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

BREAKING NEWS FROM ISRAEL

Last night, Israel came dangerously close to tragedy. Five bombs exploded across Bat Yam, targeting public buses in a meticulously planned attack. Miraculously, the buses were empty—but they weren’t supposed to be. The devices were meant to detonate during this morning’s rush hour, filled with passengers. Israeli security forces have confirmed that additional explosives were found, and a manhunt is underway for those responsible. Hamas has claimed responsibility, and we now know that this was a deliberate, coordinated effort to inflict mass civilian casualties. Authorities are urgently searching for more hidden devices, while the entire country’s public transportation system has been shut down to prevent further catastrophe for the time being.

The death of the Bibas family is a stain on the human conscience This crime exposes both the depthless cruelty of Hamas and the moral disorder of the West. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/20/the-death-of-the-bibas-family-is-a-stain-on-the-human-conscience/

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 Bibas persecution reached its dire end today with the return of the bodies of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir from Gaza to Israel. Yet even now, Hamas continues to taunt these Jews it kidnapped. Its ‘handover ceremony’ this morning was honestly one of the sickest public stunts I have ever seen. On a stage, before a heaving crowd of people waving flags and filming with their phones, Hamas militants laid out the black coffins of the young mum and her children. It was Jew hatred as theatre, a celebratory spectacle of death designed to send a sick message to the Jews of Israel: ‘Even in death you will get no peace.’ The fascists of old buried the Jews they killed in mass graves – today’s put their bodies on display for the world to gawp at.

Their Time Is Up The murder of the Bibas children caps off an 18-month catalog of horrors that has told us eexactly who our Palestinian neighbors are. Backed by a friend in the White House, Israel must secure its future through strong unilateral action. Liel Leibovitz

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/bibas-children-israel-gaza

Grief means little. Rage matters even less. All that we have now are the cold, unfeeling facts: Kfir Bibas, the baby smiling sweetly at us in the photograph, holding his pink elephant, was taken violently from his home, together with his mother Shiri and his four-year-old brother, Ariel. They were held in Gaza and eventually murdered. We may never know the details of their ordeal, but we know plenty about their tormentors. For nearly eighteen months, we’ve been collecting forensic evidence about the specimens who live in Gaza. What do we know about them? The question matters. A lot. In fact, no other does, particularly as Israel and the United States are trying to ascertain how to proceed now that the first round of the ceasefire agreement with Hamas is nearing its end.

What do we know, then?

We know the numbers: A large-scale survey of Gazans, conducted by researchers from Oxford University and published in Foreign Affairs just last week, showed that whereas only 36% of Gazans supported Hamas prior to October 7, 2023, the number spiked to well over a half in March 2024, and began to decline only when Israel successfully eliminated Yahya Sinwar in October of last year. Which should come as no surprise considering the fact that 98% of those surveyed described themselves as religious, and nearly as many said they saw the conflict with Israel in religious, not political terms: The Jews were usurpers who must be banished. How? When asked, 47% said they wanted to see Israel destroyed and replaced with a strict Islamic state governed by Sharia law, and 20% said they would settle merely for the forced removal of all Jews and their transfer to wherever it was their ancestors had lived prior to immigrating to Israel. The moderates, 17% of them, said they would be alright merely with embracing the Palestinian right of return, a kinder, gentler way to end the Jewish state.

Justice meant not only reversing Haman’s evil decree but forcing all those who were only too eager to partake in the slaughter to face the consequences of their actions.

And we know the stories: Many of the Israeli hostages who return tell variations of the same tale, of being held captive by ordinary families, abused and tormented not by bearded zealots with guns but by mothers and fathers and daughters and sons.

Matti Friedman: The Family that Never Came Home

https://www.thefp.com/p/matti-friedman-the-bibas-shiri-kfir-ariel-yarden

The deaths of Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas were too unbearable to believe. Israelis couldn’t accept it until we had no other choice.

Israeli television did not broadcast the ceremony that took place in Gaza this morning. As masked terrorists put four black coffins on a stage in Khan Younis, the channels instead showed photos of the people inside them, taken before the war began—including of an Israeli mother and two redheaded boys, laughing on a couch, picking fruit in an orchard, still believing they’re safe.

Shiri Bibas was seized from her home on October 7, 2023, along with her children Ariel, 4, and Kfir, 9 months. Their remains were returned to Israel after 10 a.m. local time. With them was the body of Oded Lifshitz, a grandfather, journalist, and peace activist who was 83 when he was kidnapped from the same kibbutz, Nir Oz.

For Israelis, October 7 is a slow-release catastrophe. Hamas has bargained not just over every Israeli hostage and corpse, but also over scraps of information about their fate, meaning that the precise death toll from the war’s first day is still not clear. Some of those we hoped were still alive turn out to have been dead from the very beginning—like Shlomo Mantzour, a grandfather taken at age 85 and thought to be the oldest Israeli hostage until last week, when new information revealed he was killed 16 months ago.

No captives have focused public sentiment like the Bibas children, the youngest Israeli hostages. Footage from October 7 showed a terrified Shiri Bibas cradling a baby and a toddler as they were taken at gunpoint from their home. The two redheads quickly became symbols of the 250 Israelis taken hostage—icons not just of the inhumanity of the Palestinians who kidnapped and murdered civilians and celebrated this barbarism as a victory, but of the unthinkable weakness of the Israeli state that allowed this to happen.

The shadow of history Both the Nazis and Hamas called for the murder of innocent Jewish children.Fiamma Nirenstein

https://www.jns.org/the-shadow-of-history/

On Oct. 6, 1943, Heinrich Himmler delivered a chilling speech to Nazi leaders justifying the murder of Jewish children. Eighty years later, on Oct. 6, 2023, Hamas senior leader Yahya Sinwar reportedly issued a similarly horrific order to his followers—not only to kill Jewish children but to kidnap them. This stark parallel underscores the persistent and brutal nature of antisemitic violence, revealing its continued threat in the modern era.

In his speech, Himmler rationalized the mass murder of Jewish families, stating: “I would not consider myself justified if I killed the adults … and then allowed their children to grow up and seek revenge against our own children and grandchildren. We have therefore decided to make this people disappear from the face of the earth.”

This ideology led to the systematic murder of 1.5 million Jewish children during World War II and the Holocaust, many slaughtered in their mothers’ arms or subjected to brutal conditions in concentration and death camps. The echoes of this horror resonate today as Hamas targets Jewish children in its acts of terror. During the attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists invaded Israeli communities, burning families alive, mutilating victims and abducting children, the youngest a 9-month-old baby. These actions were driven by religious hatred, not strategic warfare.

Sometimes, Moral Clarity Isn’t Difficult Ben Shapiro

https://pjmedia.com/benshapiro/2025/02/19/sometimes-moral-clarity-isnt-difficult-n4937126

This week, the world was reminded of the deep and abiding evil that has wormed its way to the center of Palestinian nationalistic 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 back to Gaza on Oct. 7 had in fact been murdered. Their bodies are to be returned to Israel this week; Hamas held the corpses hostage, and in return received the release of imprisoned Palestinian terrorists.

It is instructive to recall the circumstances of the Bibas family’s kidnapping. They were not, in fact, kidnapped by identified members of Hamas. They were kidnapped by Palestinians in civilian dress, who joined Hamas for their murderous spree. For over a year, zero Palestinians apparently revealed the whereabouts of the Bibas family to the Israelis; zero worked to keep them safe or to restore them to liberty.

This fits with a pattern of civilian involvement in Palestinian terror activity: the reality is that the Palestinian terror apparatus is incestuously intertwined with the Palestinian civilian population. That is why released hostages tell of being held by civilian families in Gaza; why terrorists merge so easily into the surrounding civilian population; why the popularity of Palestinian terrorist groups remains sky-high among Palestinians generally. The hard division between terrorist and civilian so cherished by the West simply doesn’t exist in practice in places like the Gaza Strip.

None of this is meant to alleviate the moral responsibility to attempt to distinguish between terror and civilian targets — a task Israel has accepted with more success than any country in the history of warfare, achieving a nearly 1:1 terrorist-to-civilian-death ratio in the heavily urban Gaza Strip. But it is vital to recognize that the Palestinian nationalist cause is itself honeycombed with cancer: that it is rooted not in a desire for an independent state to exist side-by-side by Israel, as the mythical two-state solution has now suggested for decades, but in a desire for the complete extirpation of Jewish life in the Middle East.

Again, Palestinian civilians kidnapped and held babies. They then held their corpses hostage to achieve the release of murderous Palestinian terrorists.

The Bibas family and the antisemitic moral corruption of the world’s institutions By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/02/the_bibas_family_and_the_antisemitic_moral_corruption_of_the_world_s_institutions.html

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.

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.

The Australian nurses who wished death on Israelis The hatred of Israel has become dangerously mainstream. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/18/the-australian-nurses-who-wished-death-on-israelis/

It was bad enough when two Australian nurses were caught on camera saying they wouldn’t treat Israeli patients and instead would ‘kill them’. But now 50 of Australia’s Muslim community groups have rushed to the nurses’ defence. If a couple of Aussie caregivers doing a throat-slitting gesture to a man from Israel was chilling, the fact that so many ‘Muslim leaders’ are willing to stand up for them is outright terrifying.

This sordid story started a week ago with the release of a video showing two nurses at Bankstown Hospital in Sydney engaging in the most abhorrent Israelophobic chatter. They were talking with an Israeli TikToker, Max Veifer, after encountering him on a video chat site. He told them he was Israeli. One of the nurses drew his fingers across his throat to suggest Veifer deserved to die. He said he sends Israelis to Jahannam – the Islamic version of hell. The other nurse said she would never treat an Israeli. ‘I won’t treat them, I will kill them.’

The clip went viral and the nurses were suspended. Australian PM Anthony Albanese slammed their ‘anti-Semitic comments’. There was horror across Oz that these nurses seemed to have sacrificed the core moral principle of medicine – ‘First do no harm’ – at the altar of their burning hatred for the Jewish State. Yet there’s a section of Aussie society that seems pretty blasé about the whole thing: self-appointed Muslim leaders.

A coalition of prominent Muslim groups has written an open letter criticising the ‘selective outrage’ over the nurses’ behaviour. It says the nurses were just being ‘emotional and hyperbolic’. Nice try. We all get ‘emotional’ at times but we don’t go around fantasising about the deaths of people from the world’s only Jewish nation. Emotion is no excuse for violent-minded loathing for a whole national group.

The letter says the nurses were raging against Israel, not Jews. They were expressing ‘frustration and anger’ over Israel’s ‘violent and inhumane policies’. Apparently, the ‘hypocrites’ who have called the nurses out – that would be most of Oz – are seeking to ‘weaponise accusations of anti-Semitism to silence dissent [on Israel]’. This, the letter concludes, is ‘dishonest’ and ‘dangerous’.

The only people being dangerous here are these snivelling excuse-makers for what was clearly an act of unhinged Israelophobia. Since when did anger over foreign wars justify calling for the death of citizens from the nations involved? I hated the Iraq War but I didn’t go around saying American people should have their throats slit. I oppose Rwanda’s meddling in the Democratic Republic of Congo but I don’t view Rwandans as some kind of subspecies who should be dispatched to the everlasting fires of hell.

Why Trump Must Insist on Removing Hamas From Power by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21406/remove-hamas-from-power

One of the group’s senior officials, Osama Hamdan… also threatened that Hamas would not allow any non-Palestinian party to enter the Gaza Strip.

Iran’s ruling mullahs have already lost their strategic ally with the collapse of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. Losing the Gaza Strip would therefore be another severe blow to the Iranian regime, whose declared goal is to annihilate the “Zionist entity.”

Similarly, Hamas’s longtime patrons and funders in Qatar will do their utmost to ensure that the terrorist group remains in power.

Hamdan’s statements are a clear indication that Hamas intends to maintain its control of the Gaza Strip at any cost. They are also a sign that Hamas is determined to continue its terror attacks against Israel.

Any deal that allows Hamas to remain in power would be disastrous for Israel, the Palestinians, and Arab states threatened by the Iran-led “Axis of Resistance.”

It would also undermine the Trump administration’s credibility in the eyes of many in the Middle East. The Trump administration will appear as if it is only good at making empty threats.

There should be no reconstruction of the Gaza Strip as long as Iran’s proxies remain in power. The idea of allowing the Palestinian Authority to return to the Gaza Strip as a civilian body that pays salaries and funds projects should be rejected by the Trump administration.

Even if the PA is permitted to deploy its own security forces in the Gaza Strip, it does not mean that they would be able to disarm Hamas and other terrorist groups. The PA did not do so when it was in control of the Gaza Strip between 1994 and 2007, and the assumption that it would do so now is catastrophically wrong.

The Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist group Hamas has reportedly expressed readiness to cede control of the Gaza Strip and hand it over to the Palestinian Authority (PA), headed by Mahmoud Abbas.

This assurance, however, does not mean that Hamas is willing to lay down its weapons or dismantle its military wing, Izz a-Din al-Qassam Brigades.

Hamas wants the PA to return to the Gaza Strip only to pay salaries and fund various projects, including the reconstruction of the devastation. That arrangement would still exempt Hamas of its duties and responsibilities towards the two million residents of the Gaza Strip and allow the terror group to rearm, regroup and rebuild its military capabilities.