No one can now deny the evil that is Hamas Story by Stephen Pollard
Two weeks ago the world commemorated the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In the years since 1945 the images of the inmates have become part of the fabric of history, documenting the evil of which some of our species are capable.
We may now be used to seeing them, but the pictures of starved, emaciated bodies, barely more than skeletons, have never lost the power to shock.
As a former editor of the Jewish Chronicle, I have had both to report and to confront anti-Semitism.
The battle against Jew hate has become the driving force of my professional life. Sometimes it has felt as though the Jewish people were banging our heads against a brick wall – such as when the response of so many self-described “progressives” to the barbarity of October 7 has been to demonstrate not against the barbarity but against the victims of that barbarity.
In that context, I have spent time asking myself if the scenes in Gaza and the terrible state of the latest hostages to be released might cause them to indulge in some self-reflection, or even a sense of shame that they have been marching in support of the terrorists who inflicted this evil.
I doubt it. These are the people, after all, who we have now learnt applied to the police at 2.50pm on October 7 2023 for permission to march against Israel the following week – making their application while the massacre was still in progress.
The footage of Eli Sharabi, Ohad Ben Ami and Or Levy could have come straight from 1945.
The only difference was the presence of their Hamas captors; the Nazis had fled the camps by the time they were liberated.
Hamas, on the other hand, stood proudly by as the emaciated, almost crippled bodies of the hostages were forced by their captors on to a stage to take part in the latest of the terrorist organisation’s sick propaganda stunts.
I am not religious. But I know that evil exists and we have once more seen it on display.
Or Levy is just 33 years old. His only crime was to have gone to a music festival and to have been Jewish. Hamas murdered his wife and starved him for 491 days. There is only one word for the people that did this to him: evil.
Ever since October 7 we have heard glib platitudes from around the world about “peace”, about reaching an accommodation with Hamas and about Israel needing to accept a “two-state solution”.
But there will be no peace – indeed, there should be no peace – when that necessitates accepting the presence of evil.
As Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog put it: “This is what a crime against humanity looks like. The entire world should look at Ohad, Or and Eli – who returned from the hell of 491 days in captivity, painful, emaciated and wounded, and were used in a cynical and evil ritual by damned murderers.”
Throughout the war brought on by Hamas’s massacre we have been told by much of the media – and by Hamas’s useful idiots protesting on the streets and on campus – that the real criminal is Israel.
Look at the aid shortages! The simple fact is that, far from blocking aid, Israel has gone out of its way to facilitate its arrival in Gaza.
But just as Hamas deliberately uses Palestinian civilians as human shields for its propaganda so it can accuse Israel of targeting civilians, so too it both blocks aid from being distributed (often destroying it) and seizes it for its own use.
If you want to see what real targeted starvation looks like, look at the pictures of the Israeli hostages.
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