The evils of Hamas exposed

 Gerard Baker:

As Israel faces a blitzkrieg of international condemnation again, mobilized in part by a global press happy to supply the ammunition, it is important to remember one thing:

In the war between the Jewish state and its enemies in Gaza, one side is deliberately starving innocent people to the point of emaciation. One side irrevocably denies the right of its adversary to exist. One side would, if it could, conduct a genocide against the other, wiping every last remnant off the face of the planet.

That side isn’t Israel.

In the past 10 days, two images have told two ostensibly different but paradoxically identical truths about this conflict.

On July 25 decent people everywhere were shocked by the image of a desperate Palestinian child, skeletal and frail, cradled by his mother, published, among other places, on the front page of the New York Times. His mother told the paper that her child was born healthy but was now suffering from malnutrition. Muhammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq was portrayed as a victim of a famine induced by the Israeli government’s restriction of food distribution in Gaza.

This weekend, to predictably less global attention, another image was published, this one of an Israeli man who was abducted by Hamas on the day they murdered 1,200 people in Israel and kidnapped hundreds of others. He was one of the young people seized while attending the Nova Music festival in southern Israel. Unseen for several months, he appears in the video seriously emaciated, ghostly pale and gaunt—a once-vibrant young man who has spent nearly two years in the hell of a Hamas prison.

The first image, we now know, was a misleading one. The child wasn’t a previously healthy victim of Israeli starvation. He was born with cerebral palsy, which was primarily responsible for his debilitated state. The Times clarified this in an editor’s note a few days later, though it was likely seen by a fraction of those who saw the original story.

The second image wasn’t misleading at all: Evyatar David, 24, terrified and helpless, peering out of the darkness of a Gaza tunnel, in a picture reminiscent of an inmate of Bergen-Belsen in 1944.

It says so much about the enemy Israel is up against that both images are part of the campaign against Israel. The only thing Hamas likes better than a starving Jew is a starving Gazan child. Both are useful for their ends. The former horrifies a credulous world so it puts international pressure on the Israeli government to end the combat. The latter taunts Israeli hostage families so they put similar pressure on the government. If there were a Goebbels prize for propaganda, Hamas would win it every year. It should be a source of shame that so much of the West’s media is gulled or persuaded into playing the Leni Riefenstahl part in the campaign.

What is so sickening about this—and the deafening chorus of condemnation Israel receives for its war effort—is that it is so far from the underlying moral truth of this war. Israel is the side that wants lasting peace and security. Its enemies want a state of permanent and existential war and suffering for the innocents.
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The irrational hatred of Jews did not end with the fall of the Nazis and the Third Reich.  Jew hatred is still with us.  I have never really understood why that is the case.  I have had Jewish friends from childhood to this day.  They tend to be smart and friendly in my experience.  Hamas is a mass murder organization that should be defeated.