It’s a rhetorical question, but it does not absolve Western governments from condoning and being partners in the violence and destruction of embedded Muslim populations.
When my son and I were wounded in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem in 2002, the first 24 hours were a blur. From the helter-skelter scene on King George Street after the blast to the arrival at the hospital, surgeries, and initial recoveries, everything melded into a macabre scene of fear, despair and the first rays of hope. My wife spent hours running between two surgery wards: I was having a screw taken out of my arm and two arteries put back together, while our 7-year-old son was having a shunt put in his head to remove fluid and thus prevent pressure build-up on the brain.
The next day, as we started a new normal in our family, I had a chance to spy a TV set strategically located outside of the pediatric ICU. I saw from the news broadcast angry Israeli politicians at the site of the bombing threatening Yassir Arafat and his terrorists with death and destruction. Not one of them made their way to Hadassah Hospital to check on us or any of the other blast victims. The only one who hopped in a car and drove the 20 minutes to the hospital was Ehud Olmert, who was at the time mayor of Jerusalem. He asked how we were doing and gave some kind words before moving on to visit others. The politicians at the Knesset could not move themselves to check on the victims of the attack. Rather they thought how they could use the events to advance whatever interest they had, whether it be to give in to Arafat or to destroy him and his associates.
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As the remains of the Bibas mother and children are scheduled to be returned to Israel this week, one has to take a serious look at Israel’s political leadership. As I have written many times before, the families of the hostages rightfully should move heaven and earth to get their loved ones home. That is their job. Just as we arranged that someone was always at the hospital with our son 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so the families need to do everything they can to get their family members home. I would never ask them to consider other issues. But the job of a political leader is to think of the needs of his citizens, and Israel has 10 million of them. On this score both in the U.S. and in Israel, leaders have failed badly. Everyone is using the mantra of needing to get the hostages home and ignoring the question of at what price. Whether it be people on the street who have hijacked the situation to attack Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu from a new angle or Israel’s opposition leader who only wants Bibi’s job to Donald Trump’s envoy, everyone is saying that all must be done to get every last hostage home. And while I support the idea, I hate to be the one to ask: at what price? What are the ramifications of releasing thousands of terrorists, including some of the worst murderers from the second intifada? What does it mean to bring tractors into Gaza, when those same devices can dig new terror tunnels? Everyone is so enamored with the dream of getting any living hostage out of the Gazan hellhole, that they have stopped thinking about what comes next. Like the Israeli politicians of 2002, they won’t bother to visit the wounded and bereaved should God-forbid something happen as a direct outcome of this deal.
One cannot honestly say that every Muslim is a deranged psychopathic killer. There seem to be large Muslim populations that appear not to be involved in terror, though I don’t hear any fatwas against Hamas for what they did. One has to try to imagine how depraved and deranged those who took a young mother and her very young children to Gaza really are. They could have left them alone. They had plenty of hostages already, and why would they want to bring in the headache of diapers and baby bottles? They’ll claim that Israel killed them and the entire country will wait on pins and needles for the Pathology Institute at Abu Kabir to determine if they died from malnutrition, a gunshot wound to the head or a building that fell on them. That Hamas and its supportive population are cretins and demonic lunatics needs no great additional evidence. Most of the bodies recovered from the pogrom showed signs of torture. Families were immolated together. Parents were made to watch their children die and vice versa; some people saw their dead loved ones via pictures Hamas conveniently uploaded to the deceased’s social media account. I would want to call them sub-humans, but that’s what the Nazis called the Jews in order to make it easier to kill them: we’re not killing real human beings. No, we’re killing something just one level above a cockroach. No, the Palestinians are humans, but a great number of them are the absolute worst version on this Earth. Donald Trump understood the need to encourage them to move away from civilized society. Egypt desperately wants them to stay put so as to continue sending millions of dollars of weapons to them in order to continue killing Jews and weakening Israel.
When we think of Hamas or the Pakistani rape gangs in England, we understand that we are dealing with depraved human beings and without anything that a normal Westerner would consider values. But what of those who enabled them? What of the British police and politicians who ignored the actions of these gangs for decades in numerous cities? What of the Israeli politicians who released Yahya Sinwar in the Gilad Schalit deal so as to get the good feeling of bringing the poor boy home? They condemned 1,200 people to die on October 7th. Do you think that they have any guilt over their actions? Of course not. Just as today’s politicians demand the release of the hostages at any cost. They will take no responsibility for those who are released from the Palestinian terrorists. They want that warm and fuzzy feeling of getting people home. The security forces will deal with the situation. Really? Do they have a 100 percent success rate of preventing attacks?
We have witnessed that there are Muslim populations that cannot integrate into or live peaceably with Western societies. In a smart world, Europe would eject the large number of immigrants who refuse to become Brits, French, Germans, or Dutch. Israel would work with Donald Trump to remove the Palestinian population from its borders. But we don’t live in a very smart world. The Europeans will simply watch their countries turn into Sharia-compliant nations while their original character and history will be obliterated. Israel will not only continue to let Palestinians live in Gaza, it will feed them and give them the capabilities to attack again. And thus, we go back to the beginning: so, who’s worse? The ones who perform acts of unfathomable evil in the name of their religion or the Western politicians who aid and abet them and make it possible for them to act?
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