This weekend, Hamas released some of the 240 hostages the terror group took during their mass killing spree on October 7: 13 Israeli hostages the first day, Friday; 13 more hostages on Saturday; and 17 hostages on Sunday, bringing the current total to 43 hostages. Under the current break in operations, Hamas is set to release 50 total hostages.
Why did this deal happen in the first place?
On Israel’s side, the reason is obvious: Israel values the life of its citizens in a way Hamas simply does not. In fact, Israel is willing to put its soldiers at additional risk in order to achieve the return of civilians — and even in order to protect Palestinian civilians, since Israel has complete air superiority over Gaza and could bomb the place into total submission if it sought to do so.
So for Israel, the deal was painful but clear: Try to get as many hostages out as possible, even if Hamas would be temporarily strengthened.
Meanwhile, Hamas is seeking a breather. Hamas has been absolutely pummeled: Their leadership class has been largely eliminated and their operations in northern Gaza devastated. Hamas seeks a few benefits from the temporary ceasefire: First, a break to regroup and possibly plan new operations; second, more fuel to enhance the possibility of their survival; and — most importantly, — time to try to convince the world that Israel ought to leave them intact.
That last point is the most crucial. Hamas wants the rest of the world to buy a narrative: that Hamas is, in fact, a reasonable actor.
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Now, that’s a pretty hard sell after you hang glide into Israel, murder nearly 300 people at a music festival, go house-to-house to burn babies in their cribs, rape their mothers, and slaughter civilians at will. Hamas didn’t just engage in murder — they engaged in some of the worst atrocities in modern history.
An Israeli reserve combat paramedic said he found the corpses of two teenage girls in their bedrooms: “One was on the bed. Her arm was dangling from the bed frame. Her legs were bare with bruises, and she had a bullet hole in the chest-neck area. The other was lying on the floor, on her stomach, her legs spread and her pants pulled down toward her knees. There was a liquid on her back that looked like semen. She was shot in the back of the head.”
According to a volunteer at the Shura military morgue, “We saw many women with bloody underwear, with broken bones, broken legs, broken pelvises.” Another witness described a gang rape at the Nova rave, followed by the murder of the victim: “He didn’t pick up his pants. He shot her while inside her.”
So, yes, it’s tough to turn Hamas into Israel’s moral equivalent.
But Hamas doesn’t have to do its own selling.
As always, fellow travelers in the “coalition of the oppressed,” including their cheerleaders in the legacy media, will do it for them.
The legacy media have no regrets in their pro-Hamas coverage over the course of the last few weeks. They admit as much. The BBC’s international editor claimed that the outlet has done a stellar job, despite provoking international rioting on behalf of Hamas thanks to false reporting about supposed Israeli human rights violations.
The media aren’t backing down from their pro-Hamas propaganda. Not one iota. So even as the hostage deal went through, for example, an LBC reporter asked Israel whether the unevenness of the exchange — a three to one ratio of terrorists to innocent Israelis — represented Israel’s disregard for Palestinian life.
It's Islamophobic and misogynistic that the Israelis are releasing 3 prisoners per hostage.
As if 1 Israeli is worth 3 Palestinians?!
We strongly condemn this and call for an even 1-1 deal.pic.twitter.com/FsQqX020Tz
— Tob' Goldstein (@HamasSatire) November 23, 2023
This happened to be a particularly stupid question. But the most common idiotic message of the weekend was parroted all over the legacy media: that somehow there is moral equivalence between Israel releasing terrorists and Hamas releasing children.
Let’s start with the actual facts.
Every single person Hamas is releasing is an innocent person. Every single person Israel is releasing is a criminal. Here is video of some of those being released.
Those terrorists being released are immediately being greeted with raucous cheering by Hamas supporters in the West Bank.
Israel traded attempted murderers for grandmothers, mothers, and children. Ramallah is celebrating getting their terrorists back. pic.twitter.com/dI2ZZu32x3
— Aviva Klompas (@AvivaKlompas) November 24, 2023
The released prisoners themselves immediately donned Hamas headgear and pledged to renew their terrorist efforts.
Meanwhile, here is footage of Israeli children being released to their parents, if those parents survived; some of these children have no parents, since Hamas murdered them.
An emotional reunion. Sharon and Noam, Mother and daughter, were released yesterday after 50 days being held hostage by Hamas and met their family for the first time since. pic.twitter.com/cJnwtAhLxq
— Elad Simchayoff (@Elad_Si) November 26, 2023
Here is a four-year-old American child who has been released. Both her parents are dead.
Can you see the difference between the two sides?
Even when Hamas released the hostages, they played games. Families were separated, the International Red Cross was originally denied agreed-upon access to the remaining hostages, hostage release was delayed until the last minute, and hostages were told to pose for the cameras by Hamas terrorists.
Believe it or not, Hamas propagandists spent the weekend trying to argue that this footage proved Hamas had treated these prisoners so decently they were happy with their captors.
Those propagandists include the Irish head of government, Leo Varadkar, who tweeted: “This is a day of enormous joy and relief for Emily Hand and her family. An innocent child who was lost has now been found and returned, and we breathe a massive sigh of relief. Our prayers have been answered.”
At least one of the hostages was in such poor shape that she had to be medevaced immediately.
So, how did the media play this obvious moral imbalance? They attempted to claim Israel was also holding innocent people rather than terrorists. A Sky News reporter made just that claim. A New York Times headline similarly obscured that the woman in this picture is a terrorist who was disfigured as she attempted to blow up a car bomb.
This CNN journalist claimed moral parity between small children released by Hamas thanks to Israel’s military pressure and Palestinian terrorists released by Israel to free those children.
Watch this dishonest report from CNN “journalist” @nimaelbagir.
The reason she doesn’t mention the name of the girl she is highlighting is because then people can go look up Marah Bakir’s case and see she stabbed a 19 year old border guard and then tried take his gun to kill… pic.twitter.com/BeVnHjzdNp
— AG (@AGHamilton29) November 25, 2023
Of course, the asinine Gigi Hadid did the same thing, using as her model of victimhood one Ahmed Almansara, accusing Israel of taking children as POWs, engaging in abduction, rape, humiliation, torture, and murder of Palestinians.
However, the actual video of Ahmed shows him running through a Jewish area looking for someone to stab and settling on a 13-year-old boy.
This is the game.
It is always the same game.
Pretend moral parity between Israel and its enemies. Ignore all evidence in order to do so. This allows for the continuation of the egregiously false narrative that Israel’s elimination is a legitimate goal, or that Israel ought to be forced to make concessions to terrorist groups — which are, by the way, the only governing powers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Fatah, for example, is the military wing of the Palestinian Authority and is run by Mahmoud Abbas, Israel’s supposed peace partner and the person Joe Biden apparently wants to see running Gaza after Hamas.
Over the weekend, a senior Fatah official justified the Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7 as a “defensive war.”
These are the “moderates.” The non-moderates spent the weekend murdering and mutilating the bodies of two supposed “collaborators” with Israel. Here are some of the images of that atrocity.
This was Hamza Mubarak, 31.
Two days ago he was executed by a Palestinian street mob.
His hands were bound, his legs tied.
He was hung upside down on a metal pole as hundreds of men cheered.
His legs were then cut off and his body discarded in a pile of trash.
Hamas… pic.twitter.com/J8M0RNqm7k
— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) November 26, 2023
Notice the cellphones. Notice the cheering.
And herein, again, lies the problem.
If there is no moral parity, then there can be no “two-state solution” under these circumstances. Not remotely. Not with Hamas. Not with the Palestinian Authority or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Not with any of the parties on the table.
And that’s not likely to change anytime soon.
So, what are the legacy media to do?
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They have a few options left, when the narrative that Hamas is kind to the old women and children they’ve kidnapped doesn’t fly. First, they can argue that Hamas has no agency — after all, they’re really the victims of circumstance. In fact, as it turns out, Israel is to blame for Hamas. Only the Jews have agency, so the argument goes.
Thus, according to Steve Hendrix and Hazem Balousha of the Washington Post — which has disgraced itself beyond measure as a Hamas outlet during this conflict — the real fault is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s. The Post explains Netanyahu and Hamas “found each other useful for their own purposes. … Netanyahu pursued a strategy that didn’t disrupt the status quo of a divided Palestinian population, leaving Hamas to rule in Gaza and the rival Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.”
Leave aside the fact that had Israel moved to depose Hamas over the past 20 years, the world would have condemned them for it. Leave aside the fact that the Palestinian Authority currently supports Hamas and is a terrorist group as well. The insane bigotry of suggesting the Jews are responsible for radical Muslim atrocities because they didn’t defang those radical Muslims — while you are currently arguing that Israel ought not defang Hamas — is mind-boggling.
Just to get this logic straight: Bibi is bad because he didn’t depose Hamas; Bibi must, therefore, not depose Hamas.
OK then.
If that argument doesn’t work, you can argue, as the press have been doing for weeks, that Israel’s retaliation against Hamas is just as evil as Hamas’ original attacks. Thus, we’ve seen story after story condemning Israel for not having magic weaponry that only hits terrorists, even when those terrorists hide among civilians.
Pushing this argument is Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. Naturally, Murphy then connects this ridiculous argument with the argument that Israel ought to make concessions to the Palestinians after all, since all those concessions in Gaza and the West Bank have gone so well.
None of this passes the smell test.
But it doesn’t have to. It’s all merely the predicate to a more subtle argument: that Israel should be pressured to stop.
If Israel does stop — let’s be clear about this — the hostage deal was awful.
Israel cannot stop.
Israel must wipe out Hamas. If Hamas emerges intact, Israel will be seen as weak, indecisive, and absolutely incapable of defending their citizens. Israel has routinely destroyed much of the military power of terrorist groups in surrounding areas, but so long as those groups survive, they claim victory and regrow.
Israel cannot allow that.
What’s more, Israel is at the beginning of that battle.
As Netanyahu said over the weekend, “We have three goals for this war: Eliminate Hamas, return all our hostages, and ensure that Gaza does not become a threat to the State of Israel again.” The conflict in Gaza isn’t over.
But the problem does not just lie in Gaza.
Over the coming years, Israel is going to have to take on and destroy Hezbollah on its northern border. There are currently 30,000 Israelis who have left their homes in northern Israel because they are under the umbrella of terrorist threat created by Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed terror group with at least 200,000 rockets pointed at Israel, perhaps 50,000 of which have targeting systems.
Hezbollah cannot be left to stew for long, especially given the Iranian development of a nuclear weapon.
Then there’s the so-called West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority is pathetically weak. Israel will have to engage in continuing counterinsurgency tactics in both Gaza and the West Bank in order to ensure its safety and security.
Will the West allow Israel to do what it must to protect its own security? That’s the question moving forward.
And that question is connected to a broader question: Will the West do what it has to do to protect its own security from the threat of radical Islam?
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