Monsters

Take a long look at the celebratory spectacle Hamas militants put on in Gaza as they repatriated to Israel the bodies of the Bibas children, Kfir and Ariel, and a body purported to be that of their mother, Shiri (until it was revealed that Hamas had instead passed off “an anonymous, unidentified body” for hers):

That perspective doesn’t quite do justice to the ghoulish pageant. Get a real eyeful of this scene:

Many words describe the way in which Hamas made props out of the corpses of the children they killed merely to taunt their bereaved loved ones. “Human” is not one of them. This is, without exaggeration, the conduct we expect from animals.

The bacchanalian atmosphere that accompanied the handing over of the bodies of an infant and a toddler who were stolen from their home and died in terror was too much even for the United Nations.

“Under international law, any handover of the remains of deceased must comply with the prohibition of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, ensuring respect for the dignity of the deceased and their families,” read a statement by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Even for an organization with anti-Zionism written into its DNA, this was one gleefully orgiastic display of inhumanity it could not countenance.

What are we to make of this exhibition of contempt for the bedrock values and assumptions that make civilized life possible? What does it say about the monomaniacs who have done their utmost to make daily life in the West as inconvenient as possible to protest Israel’s conduct of the defensive war to which these barbarians consigned the world’s only Jewish state? How should we regard those in the international diplomatic firmament who cling to the notion that this savagery will only be cured by statehood and that this is the sort of conduct that should be rewarded with admission into the club of legitimate, responsible nations?

The answer to these questions is self-evident to all who retain their capacity for rationality — a function that eludes so many when the value of Jewish life is at issue. These are monsters. They may owe that condition to the sick society in which they came of age, but that does not absolve them of culpability for the evil in which they are active participants.

Watching this, it’s easy to see why Israel has zero interest in occupying a Gaza Strip that remains populated with Gazans. Why the United States would take that burden off either their hands or a consortium of Sunni states that would extirpate Iran’s malign influence from the Strip, I have no idea. But it should be clear from this performance that a peace deal that allows Hamas to survive, much less retain its role as the preeminent political and military force in Gaza, is an abomination.

Hamas must be destroyed. Its supporters, the tacit and enthusiastic varieties alike, must lose their investment in this collection of vandals. They should wear the shame of the bigotry that fueled their monumental judgment lapse for the rest of their lives. The unending cascade of horrors these terrorists wrought on October 7 can never be allowed to occur again. There can be no more of this.