Suffer the Little Children Hamas’ grotesque display of murdered hostages exposes the brutality of its lies, while the West’s moral confusion enables its propaganda. By Carl M. Cannon
https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/23/suffer-the-little-children/
In his most powerful novel, Russia’s greatest 19th-century novelist wrestles with the most difficult moral problem faced by people – the suffering of innocents. At their father’s funeral, Ivan Karamazov recounts to his younger brother Alyosha, who is training to be a monk, graphic examples of sadistic acts committed against children.
“Imagine a trembling mother with her baby in her arms, a circle of invading Turks around her,” Ivan says. “They’ve planned a diversion: they pet the baby, laugh to make it laugh. They succeed, the baby laughs. At that moment a Turk points a pistol four inches from the baby’s face. The baby laughs with glee, holds out its little hands to the pistol, and he pulls the trigger in the baby’s face and blows out its brains.”
If evil exists in the world for the purpose of granting mankind free will, thereby revealing the existence of God, Ivan wants no part of religion. He also tells his brother of a married couple, “cultivated parents,” who subject their daughter to horrific beatings and torture and lock her in the outdoor privy in the freezing cold.
“Can you understand why a little creature, who can’t even understand what’s done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her?”
“The Brothers Karamazov” is fiction. But such horrors describe the real-life world we still live in. It was the world on display today when Hamas released the remains of four Israelis it kidnapped in the savage attack of Oct. 7, 2023. The oldest was Oded Lifshitz, who was 83 when abducted. Who takes an 83-year-old man?
The other three were members of a family whose names and likeness are familiar to everyone in Israel. They should have been known to everyone in the civilized world. Shiri Bibas was 32 when she was kidnapped by Hamas along with her red-headed sons, Ariel, then 4, and Kfir, who was not quite 9 months old. “Leave her alive, she has children with her,” one of the terrorists can be heard saying on a video they shot. “Let no one harm her so that they know of our humanity.”
Hamas’ idea of “humanity” was on full display Thursday in Gaza, as Hamas used the four dead hostages’ coffins as a grotesque prop, complete with their photographs and a photo of Benjamin Netanyahu rendered as a vampire. An inscription reads, “The war criminal Netanyahu and his Nazi army killed them with missiles from Zionist warplanes.”
There is, of course, no reason to believe these four people were inadvertently killed in an Israeli airstrike. It’s possible, but Hamas lies constantly about its crimes. It lies about its own hospitals being bombed, lies about casualty numbers, lies about food in Gaza, lies about hostages’ well-being, lies about everything. Its propaganda is as transparent as it is crude.
Earlier in this war, Hamas claimed – and Al Jazeera dutifully reported – that six Israelis, including American citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin, had been killed in Israeli Defense Forces airstrikes. But when IDF soldiers found them, it became clear that they had been taken to a tunnel and shot in the head by Hamas killers.
The family of Daniella Gilboa, another Israeli hostage, was told that she was dead after Hamas recorded a video faking her death. One of the terrorists came to her with a camera and told her, “Today we are filming you dead,” her mother later told journalists. They covered her in powder and debris to simulate the fallout of an Israeli bomb.
We know this because Daniella was one of the hostages rescued by the IDF. We don’t know for certain what would have happened had she not been rescued, but today’s grisly performance – before a clapping crowd of Gazans who cheered the four coffins on stage – gives the world a clue.
When this war started, demonstrations erupted in cities and college campuses all over America, Canada, and Britain. Not in support of Israel. In support of the terrorists’ cause. In the United States, the debate mostly centered on whether these “pro-Palestinian” protestors had a right to occupy buildings and campus quads. This was the wrong conversation. The real question is why are so many young people on the wrong side? The follow-up question: How to address the rot at the heart of the West’s educational establishment?
Many of these campus demonstrators wore masks. Not because of the pandemic, unless one counts Jew hatred as a virus. But their words gave the game away, unmasking the disturbing truth: Our young people have been taught that Israel is the villain. That Israelis are “colonizers,” even “white supremacists.”
Eight decades ago, the few Jews who survived the Holocaust arrived in their ancestral home with nothing. These stragglers, most of whom had little more than the clothes on their backs, escaped actual white supremacists. Today, 70% of Israelis were born in Israel. These original refugees, coupled with Jews who have flocked from elsewhere in the Middle East and those born in Israel, have turned a small piece of land into the only thriving democracy in the Middle East. For that, they are hated. For that, these children of genocide are subject to the obscene slur that they are the ones committing “genocide.” This is another slander, what Joseph Goebbels would call “The Big Lie,” one repeated endlessly around the world.
Most of the American students who repeat the phrases they have been spoon-fed are not bad people. Most of them are very good people, with admirable levels of empathy. They are our children. When they cry out for the innocent children being killed in Gaza, we should not be dismissive of their distress.
At the same time, we are failing to teach new generations to think critically, which is no small matter. Our survival depends on it.
Let’s start with this. It’s possible that Shiri Bibas and her little boys were killed by IDF warplanes. But even if that happened, the moral culpability belongs to Hamas, not Israel. It was Hamas who took that mother away from her home (after killing her parents) and kept her and her children hidden for a year. Hamas also bears the guilt of every single Palestinian civilian death. Hamas leaders count on those deaths for propaganda purposes by embedding their soldiers, weapons – and yes, hostages – in mosques and apartment buildings and hospitals.
At a time of great emotion and great rage, it is important to make these truths known to a candid world.
As scholar Thomas G. West shows, Russia’s greatest 20th-century writer provided a rejoinder to Dostoevsky’s fears that reason would undermine faith. In West’s telling, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn suggests we need both. In “August 1914,” and “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” – as well as in his two-volume Nobel Prize-winning takedown of the Soviet Union – Solzhenitsyn makes a compelling case that reason can complement our faith in a higher power – or in each other.
“Reason does not lead to the dead end of atheism and rebellion against God,” West wrote. Properly deployed, he suggests, reason leads to well-governed nations and well-governed lives. “Not that suffering and evil can ever be abolished – as if that were even desirable,” he added. “But they can be mitigated and curbed, confined to bearable proportions.”
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