RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

Behind the coffins, there was a huge image of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu with blood dripping from vampire-like teeth. The blood dripped on to an image of the Bibas family and Oded Lifshitz, the 84-year-old Israeli peace activist whose body was also returned today. Next to the image were the words, ‘The war criminal Netanyahu and his Nazi army killed them with missiles from Zionist warplanes’ (Hamas claims the hostages died in an Israeli airstrike). Try to comprehend the monstrousness of this, the depravity of it. A brazenly anti-Semitic image – the Jew as blood-drinker – was displayed behind the bodies of slain Jews. An anti-Semitic taunt – the branding of the Jews as ‘Nazis’ – was emblazoned in huge letters. They made fun of dead Jews. Before the eyes of the world, Hamas racially insulted a dead Jewish pensioner, a dead Jewish mother and two dead Jewish children.

History will record this as one of the most unconscionable events of the early 21st century. All of it: the pogrom, the kidnapping of a family, the death of that family, the transformation of the handover of their bodies into an anti-Semitic stunt, another opportunity to hawk racist propaganda about the supposed bloodlust of this people. If the world looks the other way today, if it fails to firmly condemn both the death of the Bibas family and the grotesque racist pageant of the handover of their bodies, then we will know the true depth of our crisis of civilisation.

But here’s the thing: the world has already looked the other way. The crime against humanity visited on the Bibas family did not only expose the depthless cruelty of Hamas – it also exposed the moral disorder of the West. Far from rallying to the defence of this Jewish mother and her children who had been seized by a neo-fascist militia, ‘intellectuals’ in the West said nothing. Worse, the activist class cheered the Jews’ persecutors. They referred to the day a nine-month-old Jew was seized by a mob of anti-Semites as a ‘day of celebration’. They called these crimes ‘resistance’. ‘Resistance’ once meant secretive revolt against fascists – now it was being used to celebrate a fascist revolt against Jews.

Staggeringly, some in the West conspired with Hamas’s treatment of baby Kfir as a ‘coloniser’ deserving of captivity. People ripped down posters of Kfir in cities across the West. Nora Berman reported seeing a likeness of him ‘ripped in half’ just weeks after the pogrom. A mural in London featuring Kfir was vandalised. At Harvard University, an image of Kfir was defaced and a poster of his brother, Ariel, was blacked out with paint. As the Jerusalem Post rather politely put it, ‘Harvard’s so-called enlightened community appears to have lost its moral compass’.

Think about the moral delirium it must require, the sheer political savagery, to deface an image of a baby Jew who had just been kidnapped in the worst pogrom since the Nazi era. The Westerners who raged against posters of Kfir – and the other hostages, too – were essentially swearing fealty to Hamas. They were giving brute expression on the streets of the West to Hamas’s bigoted belief that there are no innocent Israelis. To its twisted conviction that every inhabitant of the ‘Zionist entity’ is a legitimate target, from the nine-month-old baby who has never uttered a word to the 84-year-old man who campaigns for peace.

This imposition of collective guilt on to all Jews in Israel was echoed on those weekly marches too, where Israel was damned as a criminal state ailed by ‘genocidal mania’, a state whose destruction would be a boon for Palestinians and for humankind. ‘Progressives’ had no time to comment on Kfir and his family – they were too busy agreeing with Hamas that the Jewish State is a pox and its people a plague. Meanwhile, Western leaders said next to nothing about the Bibas family. ‘Perhaps you have forgotten about little Kfir Bibas’, Israel’s ambassador to the UN raged during yet another UN discussion about the problem of Israel last month. ‘But I promise you, we haven’t’, he said.

The death of the Bibas family is a stain on the entire human conscience. An Islamist death cult came for a family of Jews and the self-styled virtuous of the West either said nothing or made excuses for it. Kfir’s short life and awful death is as much an indictment of our own civilisational disarray as it is of Hamas’s barbarism. It shows, too, why Israel must survive and flourish. Next time someone asks you why there needs to be a Jewish State, tell them it’s because there are people who are happy to kill a baby Jew and others who are happy to deface images of that baby Jew. It’s this hatred that makes Israel essential.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy