RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://www.jns.org/foreign-funding-of-judicial-reform-protests-spurs-knesset-legislation/
As billionaire Elon Musk and his youthful team of tech wizards tear through America’s administrative state, exposing waste and misuse of funds, reports emerged that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funded judicial-reform protests in Israel.

While this would constitute a blatant case of U.S. interference in Israel’s internal affairs, the way in which funds bounce from one group to another before reaching their final target makes it difficult to produce hard evidence.

However, reports of heavy foreign funding of key groups opposed to the Israeli government’s plan to reform the judiciary led Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself to weigh in last week in a Knesset speech, blasting what he called the “almost inconceivable” amounts of foreign money that drove the protest movement.

Israel’s Ministerial Committee for Legislation approved a bill on Sunday to impose an 80% tax on donations from foreign entities to Israeli non-profits. Currently, those donations are tax-free.

The heart of the current debate is Blue and White Future, an Israeli NGO that funded and ran the headquarters for the coalition of groups opposing judicial reform. A significant percentage of its funding came from foreign sources.

The HQ’s website lists some half-dozen protest groups supported by Blue and White Future, including Achim L’Neshek (“Brothers in Arms”), which called for reservists to refuse service, and Bonot Alternativa (“Women Building an Alternative”), which introduced Handmaid’s Tale costumes to the protests.

The key figures in Blue and White Future are Orni Petruschka, a high-tech entrepreneur; Ami Ayalon, a former head of the Internal Security Service (Shin Bet); and Gilead Sher, an attorney who served as chief of staff and policy coordinator to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, one of the most vociferous of Netanyahu’s opponents.

Blue and White Future was founded in 2009 as Blue and White Peace. Its initial purpose was to “enhance and highlight” public support for the two-state solution.

It changed its name by the end of that year to Blue and White Future and then its raison d’être in January 2023 (when Justice Minister Yariv Levin announced the government’s judicial-reform plan), saying its new goal was “to preserve the democratic character of the State of Israel.”

In September 2023, it hired Washington-based PR firm Trident DMG, for a three-month contract of $75,000 for “strategic communications services” to boost its cause in the United States.

It would have found a ready ear in the then-Biden administration, which made no secret of its opposition to the judicial-reform plan. U.S. President Joe Biden himself spoke out against it several times in 2023.

Blue and White Future’s financials, filed with Israel’s Registrar of Associations, show that the NGO received a major shot of money in 2023, with donations jumping to 134 million shekels (~$38 million) from 824,730 shekels ($232,000) in 2022. Its budget in previous years hovered in that lower range.

In 2023, it spent most of its budget, or $31 million, on opposition to judicial reform.

Approximately 54%, or 83 million shekels (~$23 million), of the donations came from foreign sources and 71 million shekels (~$20 million) from within Israel.

Of the foreign funds, 78 million shekels came from two American nonprofits: the Middle East Peace Dialogue Network (MEDPN)—14 million shekels (~$4 million) and PEF Israel Endowment Funds—64 million shekels (~$18 million).

The MEDPN receives funds from NGOs that were given U.S. government funds. But it’s impossible to trace the origin of the money, as it’s already too far removed from the source.

For instance, USAID gives to Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, Inc., which donates to the Jewish Communal Fund, which in turn donates to MEDPN, according to DataRepublican, a website that tracks taxpayer funds.

PEF Israel’s receipt of U.S. taxpayer funds is negligible. It received $149,000 in indirect government monies, or 0.5% of its total contributions of $281 million in 2023, DataRepublican reported.

The torrent of U.S. taxpayer money streaming out of U.S. government coffers and adding to America’s $2 trillion deficit is what the Trump administration wants to bring under control.

In a Feb. 11 press conference, Elon Musk, who heads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), joined President Donald Trump at the Oval Office to discuss his efforts. He noted that many payments his team found didn’t have a categorization code or description of what the payments were for, meaning there was no way to track them.

There is a “massive number” of such checks “flying out of the building,” Musk said.

With such few basic controls, it seems unlikely that Musk’s team will uncover a smoking gun pointing to USAID grants going to Israeli NGOs.

However, Knesset Member Yitzhak Kroizer of the Otzma Yehudit Party, who wrote to Musk on Feb. 16 requesting a meeting to discuss the misuse of U.S. taxpayer funds in Israel, expressed cautious optimism that much could be uncovered.

“It will be very difficult to track all the money,” Kroizer told JNS. “But we will be able to identify fund transfers from certain entities, parties and nonprofits and how it flows from the United States to groups in Israel.”

Kroizer is interested in exposing the mechanism by which the funds are piped in, not specific dollar amounts, noting that the names of the associations change but the methods remain the same.

“They find the same ways each time to transfer the funds,” he said.

The U.S. has a history of interfering in Israeli politics, along with certain European countries, he added. “It’s the same countries all the time.”

In May 2023, a bill that would have significantly limited the amount that Israeli NGOs could receive from foreign governments was dropped after harsh criticism from the United States, Germany and France. By protesting the bill, those countries were “probably” pointing a guilty finger at themselves, Kroizer said.

In his letter to Musk, he noted, “It is well known in both Israel and the United States that past administrations have used American funds to exert improper influence in Israeli affairs. The 2015 incident involving OneVoice and VI5—organizations that received funding from the Obama administration while working to oppose the Netanyahu government—left a lasting negative impression.”

Kroizer was referring to the scandal in which a U.S. Senate subcommittee found that the Obama administration’s State Department had donated about $350,000 to a group trying to defeat Netanyahu in the 2015 Israeli elections.

The Knesset passed a law the following year requiring nonprofits that receive more than half their funding from abroad to disclose it each year to the NGO Registrar at the Justice Ministry.

The United States expressed its concern with that law, too, with the Obama administration’s Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro meeting with the law’s sponsor, then-Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked.

A U.S. embassy statement released after the meeting put in diplomatic language American displeasure, saying Shapiro “reiterated” the United States’ view that “a free and functioning civil society is an essential element of a healthy democracy, and that governments must protect free expression and peaceful dissent and create an atmosphere where all voices can be heard.”

It remains to be seen whether the current proposed Knesset bill, whose stated purpose is “to reduce the indirect influence of foreign government and political entities on the State of Israel”—if it becomes law—will have better luck than previous efforts to sharply cut outside activity in shaping Israeli politics.

https://www.jns.org/netanyahus-tightrope-trumps-net/

The Israeli opposition and so-called “international community” have spent most of the past 16 months lobbing two key demands—or accusations—at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu. One is that he must introduce a clear plan for the “day after” Hamas. The other is that he “bring home all the hostages now.”

Busy fighting an existential defensive war against the terrorists who gleefully perpetrated the massacre of 1,200 people on Oct. 7, 2023, he has been unable to give a definitive answer. He did assert, however, that the Palestinian Authority could not assume any role in Gaza. “I will not allow us to replace Hamastan with Fatahstan,” he told the now-former administration in Washington.   

The second rebuke was akin to alleging that Bibi was holding the hostages in his basement. Never mind that he was deploying the might of the Israel Defense Forces to search for them while battling the barbarians responsible for their plight—those continuing to commit the worst atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust.

Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump answered both. First, he announced that the United States would take control of Gaza. Then—after witnessing the condition of the three men emerging last Saturday from captivity looking as though they’d been liberated from Auschwitz, and hearing Hamas say that it wouldn’t free the next three the following week—he delivered an ultimatum.

“If all of the hostages aren’t returned by Saturday, [Feb. 15] at 12 o’clock … I would say, cancel [the ceasefire deal] and all bets are off and let hell break out,” he declared to reporters at the White House. “And if they’re not returned—all of them, not in drips and drabs, not two and one and three and four and two–by Saturday at 12 o’clock … all hell is going to break out.”