by Jonathan S. Tobin
Fashionable antisemitism has caused leftist myths about Israeli “oppressors” to dismiss justified anger and grief about the fate of the Bibas kids.
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| Pictures of Shiri Bibas and her children, Ariel and Kfir, who have been claimed dead by Hamas, hang outside the protest tent outside the Prime Minister's residence in Jerusalem, calling for the release of Israeli hostages still being held in the Gaza Strip, Feb. 19, 2025. Photo by Chaim Goldberg/Flash90. |
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, planned and executed a massacre in which more than 1,200 people of all ages and places in society were murdered. It did so not only by shooting missiles or sending suicide bombers into crowded buses, cafes and dance clubs. 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. We prayed that they would all be reunited and brought home. But when Yarden was among the few Israelis released under the current ceasefire deal, and his wife and children were not, it quickly became obvious that they had died in captivity.
That should force even those most inclined to rationalize Palestinian actions to conclude that the so-called “resistance” against Israel that Hamas and its allies aren’t just garden variety terrorists; they are baby killers.
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.
How is that possible? The answer isn’t complicated.
An increasingly significant proportion of international opinion, as well as of Americans, has turned on Israel since Oct. 7. While, as always is the case with polls, it depends on how you pose the question, a number of surveys show a decline in backing for Israel, and its right to defend itself and the war against Hamas it has been fighting for the last 16 months. Though most Americans still back Israel, this shift to support the war on the Jewish state is especially apparent when it comes to young people.
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.
Like other neo-Marxist theories, those indoctrinated in such beliefs—a demographic that includes most of those who have gone through the mainstream American education system in recent years—encourage the dehumanization of those who hold the wrong identity and/or the wrong views about the world, according to fashionable leftist doctrine. And that is what has fueled the post-Oct. 7 surge in Jew-hatred worldwide.
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.
To those who buy into the anti-Zionist mindset, by living in Israel—even within the 1967 borders and in communities where support for peace with the Palestinian Arabs was prevalent—Jewish residents and often pacifists in places like Kfir Oz can be said to have had it coming on Oct. 7.
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.
Lies and rationalizations
Since Oct. 7, they have spewed forth a series of often-contradictory arguments and narratives justifying Palestinian conduct. They falsely claimed that Gaza was an “open-air prison” whose inhabitants had a right to “resist” Israeli oppression. They further argued that even though Hamas had initiated this round of fighting with unspeakable atrocities, it was Israel’s efforts to defend itself against this Palestinian terrorism that was the real crime.
They cite the suffering of Gazans during the subsequent war as a reason not to care about the Bibas family. While that suffering is real, they refuse to accept that the people who started the war are the ones who are responsible for the horror inflicted on both sides of that conflict.
No doubt we will hear in the coming days that it wasn’t Hamas that killed the Bibas boys and their mother—that it was the Israelis who did it in the course of their war on the terrorists. We don’t know if this is true. Even if they were killed by Israeli fire on terrorist enclaves and fortresses that were deliberately constructed to increase civilian casualties, the idea that Hamas is innocent of their deaths is risible. They were in Gaza and exposed to danger not because the Israeli government was heartless or complicit in their murders but because they were dragged there by terrorists that ruled the Strip.
Despite the dogmatic justification of their crimes by Israel’s enemies, which is morally equivalent to Holocaust denial, other mothers and children, as well as fathers and sons, were murdered on Oct. 7, with many slaughtered by horrific methods that are hard to think about.
Yet once you’ve been convinced that Jews have no rights, those crimes become just details to be dropped down an Orwellian memory hole. Those who have romanticized “resistance” to Israel—like best-selling author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has spoken of his wish to have taken part in Oct. 7—the murder of one mother and her children is an act that is justified by Jews simply living in the one Jewish state on the planet.
In this way, Palestinian Arabs who deliberately set out to kill Jewish babies can be depicted as heroes and the Israelis who seek to avoid civilian casualties while trying to defeat the Oct. 7 criminals are the bad guys. Those with an unbroken moral compass recognize the difference between the baby killers and people trying to stop them.
That’s why we shouldn’t expect the news that Shiri, Ariel and Kfir died at the hands of their captors or their funerals to shift public opinion about Israel or the war on the part of those who have been taught that Israel has no right to exist.
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. Ordinary Germans looked the other way as their Jewish neighbors were taken away and sent to their deaths. The best and brightest of their young men fought to preserve the Nazi regime and/or took part in the slaughter of 6 million Jews, including 1.5 million children, and millions of other victims.
The point being is that if you cheer for or justify these Hamas baby killers, it isn’t just that you’re mistaken about the origins and causes of the post-Oct. 7 war or have been misled by the misinformation about it spread by the Palestinians. It means you are no different from those ordinary Germans who stood by with indifference or actually facilitated the Holocaust.
During World War II, the people of the Allied nations instinctively understood that there was no moral equivalence between those murdered by the German Nazis and their collaborators and civilians killed as a result of military actions that led to the liberation of Europe. But that wise understanding of the nature of war is not shared by much of liberal and leftist elite public opinion today. Instead, they have accepted the big lies about Israel committing “genocide” and Hamas terrorism being justified “resistance.”
This sort of broken moral compass is to be found among so many of those who consider themselves good people and can be discerned in many ways. It’s evident among those who think that democracy can only be preserved by trashing its basic values through censorship of dissent against leftist orthodoxies. It’s also present among those who have come to reject the canon of Western civilization because it doesn’t conform to divisive woke ideas about race.
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.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek
and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American
political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle
East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think
Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin
Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and
YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor
and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger.
He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other
writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and
foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia
University.
Source: https://www.jns.org/the-hamas-baby-killers-and-a-broken-global-moral-compass/
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