It’s not enough to be horrified by Hamas. Any healthy society must also be horrified by anyone who shared Hamas propaganda throughout the war.
The legions of pro-Hamas lemmings marching throughout American and European cities have tricked us into lowering the civilizational bar. We tend to be sated with scraps—just denouncing Hamas has become some kind of achievement. But the scale of Hamas’s depravity should leave its useful idiots tortured by their own conscience as well.
Because they ran interference for stuff like this:
“The father of Noa Marciano has spoken publicly for the first time, sharing harrowing details of his daughter’s final moments in Gaza.
“Speaking to a small crowd, her father Avi claimed that Noa was murdered by a doctor in Shifa hospital, who injected air into her veins – and that the family found out about her death after they were sent a video of her murder via the social media network Telegram.
“‘Noa is begging for her life,’ he said of the video, adding that, by the end of the clip, ‘she’s sweating but there’s no life to her body.’”
Noa Marciano was taken alive from Nahal Oz on October 7, along with six other female soldiers. Hamas blamed her death on an Israeli airstrike, and media were happy to repeat the claim. Hamas filmed Marciano in a hostage video pleading with Israel to stop the airstrikes, then filmed Marciano’s dead body.
What had actually happened, however, was that Hamas brought Marciano to Shifa Hospital alive and then executed her there in cold blood. Shifa was one of the hospitals that Israel said were being used by Hamas, sometimes to hold hostages, while the media pooh-poohed the claims. This is why “according to the Gaza Health Ministry” is insufficient, even if it’s followed by “… which is controlled by Hamas.” Once you know a claim or statement comes from Hamas, you cannot play the he-said-she-said game, as if dueling Israeli and Hamas claims have equal weight. Reciting Hamas talking points isn’t “reporting.”
That is especially true on subjects such as how a hostage died in Hamas captivity. The lie that IDF strikes killed the Bibas children persisted until the truth came to light: Palestinian terrorists brutally murdered the children with their own hands, then mutilated their bodies to hide the evidence.
There is also the problem of moral equivalence: When Israeli strikes did kill hostages that Hamas took and then used as human shields, the media presented it as if Hamas’s hands were clean. “Some were killed by Hamas, some by Israeli fire, some their cause of death unknown,” the New York Times put it in a May article. But if you start a war, take hostages, and then use those hostages as shields in the war you started, you are to blame for their fate. Hamas murdered Marciano; the only question was how.
Then there was this week’s revelation that Hamas hoarded baby formula. Israel’s claims that it was letting in plenty of aid? True. Accusations that Israel was starving Palestinian babies? False. But it does seem pretty clear that Hamas was trying to cause the death of innocent babies just so it could blame it on Israel.
No one should be surprised by this. But the libel that the Jews were deliberately murdering children had its intended effect: Jews all over the world were violently attacked, Western countries pulled support for the war effort to displace Hamas, European outrage torpedoed a cease-fire deal, and Palestinian anti-Hamas activists were demonized.
“When countless other Palestinian activists and I from Gaza said this back in July, August, and September, we were villainized, attacked, threatened, and made into pariahs by the ‘pro-Palestine’ industrial complex and activist mafias, even though for Gazans, the evidence was so clearly apparent before our eyes,” wrote Gaza native and Atlantic Council fellow Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib.
“Never allow yourself to be a useful idiot in Hamas’s propaganda,” Alkhatib added. “You can have compassion for the real suffering of the Palestinian civilians of Gaza, and demand Israeli action to facilitate aid entry into the coastal enclave, while still holding Hamas accountable for its part in causing a hunger and starvation crisis in the first place.”
Forget “compassion.” There’s no avoiding the grim reality that “the real suffering of the Palestinian civilians of Gaza” was the goal of Hamas and its Western loyalists all along.
