a symbol of the brutality of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack.”
That sentence is accurate. But in another universe, one where the “international community” cares a whit for justice and human decency, the sentence would read this way: “For everyone, the story of the Bibas family has become a symbol of the brutality of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack.”
In such a world, the faces of the Bibas children would be everywhere at all times. In the world in which we live, by contrast, posters with those faces get torn down from bulletin boards. In the kind of world we hope to deserve to inhabit, no children’s charity or NGO would go a day without drawing attention to Kfir and Ariel and the monsters who stole them.
The crimes against the Bibas family are indeed the symbol of the anti-civilizational menace that is Hamas—but also of the cowardice of the political and cultural leaders of the enlightened West. Yes, we should be ashamed of our fellow Americans, who not only won’t mention the Bibas family but won’t even learn the name of a single American hostage held in Gaza throughout the war….
As the “pro-Palestinian” mobs filled the streets of every major city to celebrate Hamas’s slaughter, Jews around the world looked at them dumbfounded; they kidnapped a baby. How much does one have to hate Jews to side with the monsters who kidnap babies? A lot, is the answer—an unpleasant realization Jews came to over the past 16 months.
Kfir’s face became a symbol of the conflict because it represented a line that had been crossed and cannot be uncrossed. Members of Congress giddily attended tentifada demonstrations that were no longer simply “pro-Palestine” or “anticolonial”; they were about defending those who stole Kfir from his home and dragged him to Gaza where, according to Hamas, he died. And it is impossible for the rest of us to pretend that we didn’t see a chunk of society, whether in person or online, rush to cross that line and cheer the people who kidnapped a baby….
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