My column in the New York Post. Melanie Phillips.
The grotesque Hamas circus surrounding the release of Israeli hostages has shocked many around the world.
Israeli forensic tests on the bodies of the youngest of the murdered Israeli hostages, 10-month-old Kfir and 4-year-old Ariel Bibas, revealed that their captors had murdered these children with their bare hands and then mutilated the bodies to support the false claim that they’d been killed in an Israeli airstrike.
Their mother, Shiri, whose body was returned one day later after Hamas had tried to pass off a different body as hers, had been murdered at the same time.
The coffins were paraded through wildly cheering crowds exulting in the murder of Jews.
What kind of people would want to murder a baby and a toddler? What kind of people would exult over their coffins, hurling taunts as they cheered in a grisly open-air carnival of murderous hatred?
To anyone who has been paying attention to the nearly century-old war against the Jewish homeland, none of this should be at all surprising.
On October 7, Israeli children were murdered in front of their parents. Among all the women, children and men slaughtered that day, a number were tortured, raped, beheaded and burned alive.
Such behavior is not confined to Hamas. Palestinian Arabs in general have systematically targeted Jewish children and adults for barbaric and sadistic slaughter and mutilation.
In 2000, two Israeli soldiers took a wrong turn and drove into Ramallah in the so-called West Bank. They were dragged from their car into a police station, where they were murdered. One of the bodies was then thrown out the window to the lynch mob that had gathered outside and which tore the body to shreds.
In 2004, Arab terrorists opened fire on the Hatuel family’s car near their home in Gaza when Jews still lived there. They shot and murdered at close range Tali Hatuel, who was eight months pregnant, and her four daughters, ages 11, 9, 7 and 2.
In 2011, five members of the Israeli Fogel family, including 11- and 4-year-old boys and a 3-month-old baby, were massacred in their beds by two terrorists from a neighboring Arab village. The baby’s head was almost severed from her body.
This pattern of depravity goes back almost a century. In 1929, Arab mobs massacred more than 70 Jews in Hebron. In The Wandering Jew Has Arrived, Albert Londres provided this account of how these mobs behaved toward some 50 of those Jews who tried to find refuge inside a bank.
He wrote: “They cut off hands, they cut off fingers, they held heads over a stove, they gouged out eyes. … They mutilated the men. They shoved 13-year-old girls, mothers, and grandmothers into the blood and raped them in unison.”
The same kind of utterly depraved behavior is regularly exhibited by the Islamists of ISIS, al Qaeda and other such groups.
In June 2016 in Mosul, Iraq, 19 Yazidi women who refused to become sex slaves were burned alive inside iron cages by ISIS terrorists.
| | Yazidi girls burned alive for refusing to have sex with ISIS captorsNineteen Iraqi Yazidi girls who refused to have sex with their Islamic State captors were placed in iron cages a... |
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Earlier this month, more than 70 bodies of Christians, including women, children and the elderly who had been taken hostage by Islamists, were found tied up and beheaded inside a church.
These similarities are no coincidence. From the early years of the 20th century, when Hitler’s ally the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al Husseini falsely accused the Jews of aiming to destroy the al-Aqsa mosque — a claim repeated even today by al Husseini’s explicit fanboy, the Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas — the attempt to suppress and then destroy the Jewish homeland has been a feature of Islamic holy war.
The Jews are the only people for whom the land of Israel was ever their national home. Palestinian identity is a fabrication that was cooked up in the 1960s by the Egyptian-born “Palestinian” terrorist leader Yasser Arafat — who was radicalized by al Husseini — and the Soviet Union, in order to steal from the Jews their ancestral home and their own history in those lands.
Yet Palestinianism is the default cause of western progressives, who believe the lie that the Palestinians are the indigenous people of the land who have been exiled and oppressed by the Israelis — and are mostly merely wretched and poor and have nothing to do with terrorism.
But behind the Hamas storm troopers who led the October 7 attack, Gaza civilians poured across the shattered border to rape, murder and kidnap Jews and others.
“Ordinary” Gaza civilians paraded and abused those who were dragged back into Gaza and desecrated the bodies of those who had already been murdered.
The Arabs of Gaza not only elected Hamas, but the vast majority have said repeatedly that they support the murder of Jews and want Israel destroyed.
Polling shows even greater majorities for this agenda among the Arabs of the “West Bank.” Officials of Fatah — the main party in the supposedly moderate Palestinian Authority — have openly celebrated the October 7 atrocities and declared their intention to repeat them.
For months, the Israelis have been struggling to keep the lid on dozens of terrorist plots emanating from the Arabs of the “West Bank,” against a backdrop of threats to perpetrate an October 7-style invasion of Israeli towns in central Israel.
A few days ago, an enormous plot to detonate bombs on rush-hour buses in central Israel was foiled only when a number of these devices exploded in empty buses the previous evening — because when priming the bombs, the terrorist had confused 9 a.m. with 9 p.m.
Support for the Palestinians has knocked the west off its moral compass altogether. It’s not just that it’s signed up to a cause that’s profoundly anti-Jew. It’s because the west has come to believe that an evil cause represents conscience itself.
Islamism is a death cult. So is its “Palestinian” offshoot. But the west is unable to acknowledge this because it’s in the grip of a death cult of its own.
As I write in my new book, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West — and Why Only They Can Save It, the west has had a cultural death wish for decades. Undermining its core values, it no longer believes in objective truth. Everything is a matter of opinion. Feelings trump facts and evidence.
Inverting truth and lies, victim and aggressor, the west is unable to see the Palestinian cause for the evil that it is. And consumed by the belief that western civilization is fundamentally bad, it refuses to acknowledge the Islamist threat not only to Israel but also to itself.
So as the west’s cultural elites undermine and hollow out their own civilization, the Islamist death cult is moving in for the kill — with the Palestinian Arabs creating the Trojan Horse of the Middle East.
It’s high time the west woke up to the bitter reality of the entire Palestinian cause, and to the way its own agenda of cultural self-loathing has softened it up for the triumph of its enemies.
Melanie Phillips is the author of “The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West — and Why Only They Can Save It,” out now.
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