Hamas baby killers and a broken global moral compass

 Full article at https://www.jns.org/the-hamas-baby-killers-and-a-broken-global-moral-compass/

 As much as anything else, two little red-haired boys and their mother symbolized the barbaric cruelty of the Hamas assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The video of a terrified Shiri Bibas, 32, clutching and comforting her two children—Ariel, 4, and Kfir, just 9 months old at the time—as they were being pushed away by Hamas terrorists into captivity in Gaza should haunt the conscience of humanity in much the same way as some of the most iconic images of the Holocaust.

But it did not. Or at least, it didn’t do so sufficiently to prevent a sizable portion of the international community from thinking of their captors as the good guys in the war that the Palestinians started on Oct. 7. Now, 500 days after that infamous and tragic date, as their fate has been revealed, we are also being forced to come to terms with the extent of the moral failure of the world to respond appropriately to this brazen act of genocidal terrorism.

To much of the world, the Bibas children were just Zionist propaganda, not human beings who were brutalized for the crime of being Jewish. Their likenesses were not to be tolerated—let alone viewed with sympathy. Posters of them and others kidnapped by Hamas were put up around the world only to be torn down by brazen antisemites.

Yet now that Hamas has announced that the bodies of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir are to be handed over to Israel this week as part of the first phase of ceasefire/hostage deal that has, at least for the moment, halted the fighting, attitudes toward the fate of the Bibas family has become an unavoidable test of our common humanity.

Vestiges of decency

That is a test that much of the international community is failing miserably. And it’s important for the rest of us, even as we mourn for the Bibas family, to take note of this and ask why it should be so.

It’s not just that Hamas wants to destroy Israel and commit genocide against its population. The terror group that, contrary to the claims of former President Joe Biden, has the backing of most Palestinian Arabs. Its “fighters” and the Palestinian civilians who followed in their wake when Israeli communities were attacked on Oct. 7, engaged in an orgy of murder, torture, rape and kidnapping in a way that made it clear that they had shed any vestige of humanity or decency.

More than that, it boasted proudly of these bestial crimes by posting photos and videos of their actions on social media to make it clear that their attack was a trailer for what they aim to do to the rest of Israel—or at least it did so before their foreign supporters perversely began to deny any of it actually happened.

When stated that way, the atrocities of Oct. 7 are, as awful as they were, still something of an abstraction. But when you look at the images of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir as they cowered in the face of their kidnappers after their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz was attacked, we see it in a different light. They are not just statistics. They are human beings with whom anyone can identify.

That’s why so many decent people came to care so much about them.

We knew that Yarden Bibas—Shiri’s husband and the children’s father—had left their house’s safe room in a futile attempt to save his family, and had also been kidnapped. 

Motivation for antisemitism

Regardless of the details of the crime that we don’t yet know, the unavoidable truth is that a toddler, an infant and their mother were all murdered by their Palestinian captors.

Once we arrive at that sad conclusion, it is incumbent on us to ponder how it is that even after learning about this so many people, including a large number of those who consider themselves progressives, humanitarians and opposed to barbarism, still support Hamas and oppose Israel.

Muslim and Arab sympathy for the Palestinians, coupled with a long tradition of Jew-hatred so prevalent in the Islamic world, is part of the reason. But throughout the West, this development is the result of the spread of toxic leftist ideologies like critical race theory, intersectionality and the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) that pointedly excludes Jews from its alleged crusade for better treatment of minorities.

It is also why so many college and university students, especially those attending elite schools, have come to believe that the Bibas family simply doesn’t fall into the category of people who deserve the empathy of fellow human beings. As was the case for European fascist and Nazi ideologues a century ago, left-wing intellectuals and those who have fallen under their influence believe that Israelis and Jews are undeserving of compassion.

It didn’t matter to them that Gaza wasn’t “occupied” on Oct. 7. The fact that every Israeli soldier, settler and settlement had been withdrawn from the Strip in 2005 and that since 2007, it had been an independent Palestinian state run by Islamist terrorists was irrelevant.

A broken moral compass

For generations, decent people have wondered how it was that the citizens of what was arguably the most civilized and scientifically advanced society in Europe—Germany—behaved as they did during the Holocaust. The answer was that they didn’t believe in the humanity of the Jews. 

But at the heart of the argument are those who take the side of the Hamas baby killers and spread hatred for a moral and democratic Israel, as well as for the Jewish people. Not for the first time in world history, antisemitism has provided a justification for the murderers of Jewish children.

How the Media Dodges Responsibility

 *A donkey was tied to a tree. One night a ghost cut the rope and released the donkey.

*The donkey went and destroyed the crops in an adjacent farmer's land. Infuriated, the farmer's wife shot the donkey and killed it.

*The donkey's owner was devastated at the loss. In reply, he shot dead the farmer's wife.

*Angered by his wife's death, the farmer took a sickle and killed the donkey's owner.

*The wife of the donkey's owner got so angry that she and her sons set the farmer's house on fire.

*The farmer, looking at his house turned into ashes, killed the wife and children of the donkey's owner.

*Finally, when the farmer was full of regret, he asked the ghost as to why did it kill them all?

*The ghost replied, "I killed nobody. I just released a donkey that was tied to a rope. It is all of you who released the devils within you which resulted into everything bad that occurred thereafter."

*Today's media is like that ghost. It keeps releasing donkeys on a daily basis. And people react and argue with each other, hurt each other, without having a second thought.

*In the end, the media dodges all responsibilities. So, it's our responsibility to not react on every donkey released by the media and preserve our relationship with our friends, relatives and community.

PA cancels ‘pay for slay’ - Really?

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

The ‘pay-for-slay’ program refers to the PA’s policy of providing financial support to terrorists who carry out attacks against Israelis.

Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas signed a decree on Monday ending the notorious “pay-for-slay” program, which provides stipends to jailed Palestinian terrorists and the families of slain terrorists.

Despite this decision, widely perceived as part of an overture to the Trump administration, a PA spokesman has reported that Ramallah is creating an alternative mechanism for funding jailed terrorists and the families of slain terrorists. (Again trying to deceive the rest of the world?)

Although Abbas indicated Monday he was ending this program, the PA’s WAFA outlet reported that the payments are merely being transferred from the Ministry of Social Development to the National Palestinian Economic Empowerment Institution, an entity under PA control.

Additionally, families of terrorists will remain eligible for financial aid under the same criteria as needy families.

A decision was made to fool Israel into ceasing its policy of deducting tax funds from payments to terrorists and their families. (Who are they kidding?)

Before this decision, there was already a downward trend in the payments terrorist families received for attacks. According to research, the  payments under the “pay-for-slay” program decreased by 30 to 40% in 2024, despite an expected increase.

Col. (res.) Adv. Maurice Hirsch, a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, identified several factors contributing to this decline.

a)  bureaucratic difficulties have arisen since Red Cross representatives have been barred from visiting prisons.

b)  Hirsch stated, “The economic pressure on the Palestinian Authority has reached an unprecedented level. According to new data from the Finance Ministry, Israel has deducted approximately NIS 3 billion from PA funds as of November 2024.”

c) the ongoing war in Gaza, which has disrupted the transfer of funds and the documentation required to access them.

Our New Neighbours?

 If these are to be our new neighbours, 

then at least we have a common language!!

Terror Finance at the US State Department and USAID

MEF research finds that the Department of State and U.S. Agency for International Development have provided hundreds of millions of dollars to organizations involved with designated terrorist organizations.

Executive Summary

• The Middle East Forum’s multi-year study of USAID and State Department spending has uncovered $164 million of approved grants to radical organizations, with at least $122 million going to groups aligned with designated terrorists and their supporters. Billions more of federal monies has been given to leading American aid charities which have consistently failed to vet their terror-tied local partners, and show little interest in improving their practices, to the apparent indifference of the federal government.

• Millions of federal dollars have been handed by USAID to organizations directly in Gaza controlled by Hamas, with government officials even visiting Gaza terror proxies’ offices and launching joint programs.

• USAID beneficiaries have called for their lands to be “cleansed” from the “impurity of the Jews,” among dozens of other chilling examples. USAID staff attend the offices of charities which seemingly operate on behalf of senior Hamas leaders, while staff of multiple multi-million dollar USAID beneficiary charities openly praise and encourage violence against Jews.

• State Department money has been handed to radical domestic groups such as the Tides Foundation, which members of Congress have accused of funding pro-Hamas, anti-Jewish violence in college campuses across America.

• Easily manipulated and complicit fellow travelers, including major aid organizations such as World Vision and Catholic Relief Services, as well as advocacy organizations such as InterAction, serve as important vehicles, sometimes knowingly, for terror-tied Islamists, both in the United States and abroad. These charities are dependent on federal funding, receiving billions of taxpayers’ dollars.

• Federal funding subsidizes efforts by domestic Islamists involved with Hamas, Jamaat-e-Islami and the Turkish regime, to abrogate rules and scrutiny in the United States intended to tackle the threat of terror finance.

• Records of federal funding, particularly through USAID, are obfuscated by deficient disclosure practices, deleted data, and deliberate attempts to evade transparency, with millions of dollars given to anonymous beneficiaries in terrorism-stricken areas of the globe.

• Over the past year, USAID’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) has served as a lone voice of internal concern over USAID’s funding systems, warning about the failure of current procedures to identify awardees’ links to violent extremism, obfuscation by foreign NGOs and UN agencies, and the clear risk of abuse of the vetting and funding systems by “armed groups.” Should USAID be merged into the State Department, as current reports indicate will happen, it is vital that the observations and analysis of the USAID OIG are not lost.

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Permission to Publicize

(Written by a friend yearning for some truth in the agenda driven media of today)

The words of the title reverberate in our minds since the beginning of this long war. They gave us the creeps when they open the news and everybody’s tension went up. A bit like reciting the words in our Yom Kippur prayers “who by water, who by fire”… who is it now, how many, do I know any of the names? Even if we don’t know any of the soldiers killed in action our hearts contract, as if all of them were our own sons. We care for each and every one, because we cherish life and we mourn with their families and friends. Let’s hope that there will be no more victims.

Listening to the news has been my habit for years. The radio has been on most of the time, mainly since I live alone. It helps to have someone talking, even if it is in the background. Sometimes the programs are interesting, not only news, but stories of events and experiences of people all over the world. However, in recent years it has become nerve racking and difficult.

Some say that the general news outlets are one sided, manipulative and depressing. Others are sometimes aggressive, but then try to give a more optimistic picture of the developments. Who to listen to?

Talking to my son has become very challenging. If I open the conversation: “have you heard about….” He stops me immediately. “Don’t tell me – I don’t need to know everything!” Where are the interesting and informing talks we used to have? He is adamant not to be inundated by depressing and often faulty news. His argument is that if it is really important, it will get to me somehow. That’s all he needs. He has found for himself some outlets and contacts he agrees to listen to, mainly since they look at the situation from a more refined and trustworthy aspect, allowing faith in a better future.

In the past couple of weeks, since some kind of shaky ceasefire has brought more quiet, the news has changed, not always for the better. On one hand, we all are happy about every hostage being released, but the news again work on our nerves. We really do not need to know every detail and be emotionally challenged all the time. On the other hand, reports and opinions that disunite and split the population have surfaced again and bring back the ugly atmosphere that existed before the war.

Can our country heal from all our afflictions?

 

Hebrew Uni offers full scholarship to freed hostages

By JNS January 27^th 2025

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem is offering full scholarships in any field of study to all released hostages, the school announced on Sunday.

The university is offering full scholarships for a three-year academic degree—covering both bachelor’s and master’s programs—to all captives freed from Gaza, along with a dedicated fund to ensure children who were held hostage can access higher education in the future.

A bachelor’s degree in Israel normally requires three years of full-time study.

The initiative includes personalized academic guidance, psychological support, and career counseling, aiming to provide a foundation for their recovery and reintegration.

The program is designed to serve as a cornerstone for these individuals’ return to normalcy, equipping them with the tools to achieve their personal and professional aspirations.

“We are committed to standing by all who experienced the horrors of October 7 and the prolonged captivity under Hamas. It is our responsibility to support them in every way possible,” said Professor Tamir Sheafer, rector of the Hebrew University.

“We aim to help them rebuild a hopeful future and provide a solid anchor in their long rehabilitation journey. As Israel’s leading academic institution, we believe in the transformative power of higher education and its potential to drive personal and societal change. This initiative reflects our deep ethical and social commitment,” Sheafer said.