That’s a headline I never thought I’d be writing. But when the news that Hamas had beheaded Israeli babies first came out, many many people tried to claim it was untrue. Apparently it has now been verified by many reporters and photos have been released, although I imagine some will continue to deny it.
Much like Holocaust denial, this serves a need on the part of Palestinian apologists, of which there are many.
I remember reading long ago – I believe in a book by Primo Levi about his time in Auschwitz – that one of the ways in which concentration camp guards amused themselves with their Jewish victims was to tell them that in the unlikely event that they somehow survived, and tried to tell the world what had happened in the camps, the world would never believe them. This was an interesting form of psychological torment, and I have to say that the Nazis were not entirely wrong about that disbelief.
Eisenhower understood this. People’s minds reel at the idea of such vicious savagery. And so he ordered the following:
While Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower had studied his World War II enemy, he was unprepared for the Nazi brutality he witnessed at Ohrdruf concentration camp in April 1945. Bodies were piled like wood and living skeletons struggled to survive. Even as the Allied Forces continued their fight, Eisenhower foresaw a day when the horrors of the Holocaust might be denied. He invited the media to document the scene. He compelled Germans living in the surrounding towns and any soldier not fighting at the front to witness the atrocities for themselves.
I’ve made the point, as have others, that one difference between WWII’s Nazi murderers and the present-day Hamas ones is that the Nazis assumed that the world would disapprove of their atrocities if people saw photos or movies of them or even heard some of the details. They correctly figured that many European countries wouldn’t mind getting rid of their Jews but might balk at the idea that most of those Jews (and others, although the main targets were the Jews) were to be summarily slaughtered, including babies, and that the ones allowed to live would be worked to death while simultaneously being starved to death while being mistreated in other myriad diabolical ways. In fact, the whole Nazi genocidal enterprise was diabolical, and so they kept it at least somewhat hidden. Earlier – before they had instituted the more efficient method of gas chambers on a large scale, they had encountered a manpower shortage in their Jew-killing efforts in Eastern Europe and had to enlist some of the natives to help with the Einsatzgruppen killings (focusing mostly on Jews but not limited to them), and they certainly did find many willing to cooperate in killing Jews. But still it wasn’t something the Nazis proudly broadcasted around the world, for what seems like obvious reasons.
Hamas does the opposite. Its killers video their diabolical atrocities and consider publicizing them to be good PR for the world’s Jew-haters, plus it’s a way to torture relatives of the victims. When I say “diabolical,” I mean “as in a horror movie such as Silence of the Lambs,” because it has been revealed that one of the things the Hamas terrorists did was to video the murders with victims’ cell phones and then post them to the victims’ Facebook pages or send them to the families so they could watch them in living color.
This is sadism of an extreme order, adapted to the modern internet social media age.
And yet we find people on Twitter (X) saying that Hamas didn’t actually behead all the babies they killed, as though that would be some sort of defense. Or that they killed babies but didn’t behead them. What’s going on with those deniers? Some are just psychopathic liars. But I think that most are just in desperation to preserve their belief system. So they must say – and believe – that the Israelis are lying about this, despite the documentation. They are also desperate to hide and/or deny the savagery of Hamas because one thing they know is that people generally love babies and want to protect them and are outraged when they are tortured and killed. That is why this act of barbarity seems to have shocked some people who had remained relatively unmoved by the rapes and the other killings, acts to which many people have somehow become desensitized (as long as they, their relatives, or their friends aren’t the victims). Baby killing is harder to ignore – and baby-beheading ups the horror ante even more.
A great many people fear that the Palestinians and the MSM will use the Israeli response as propaganda to drum up sympathy for, if not the devil, than the terrorists of Hamas and the people under their sway in Gaza. And they will certainly try, and the MSM will help them. But I don’t think it will gain them anyone who is not already firmly in the Hamas camp. I have spoken to and read the writing of several people for whom Saturday’s attack was a bridge too far; the atrocities Hamas committed are just too great and they understand that Israel must retaliate much more harshly than previously. But I have neither spoken to nor heard about anyone who had previously supported Israel who is now turning away from Israel because of the bombing of Gaza. Most sane people – and there still are a few – can see that an attack such as last Saturday’s makes it extremely clear that Israel can no longer tolerate Hamas in Gaza. The ones who cannot understand it were already lost.
People who cannot see the distinction between going into people’s homes and torturing and killing them and their babies, versus children killed as collateral damage by bombs directed at military or terrorist targets and with every effort to avoid killing civilians – sadly, such people are also lost. And yet there are many of them, and they believe that their stance is virtuous because it is against killing babies no matter why it occurs. Well, I’m against killing babies, too. But the terrible calculus of self-defense in war means that it will sometimes happen and that there is no way to avoid it, only minimize it if possible. In contrast, Hamas tries to maximize it, not only the killing of Israeli babies but also of its own children whom it purposely puts in harm’s way for propaganda purposes.
As this Hamas official says:
The interviewer interjected, “But all this was part of Hamas’s strategy in preparing for this attack.”
“Of course,” Baraka said, according to the translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute, a nonprofit press monitoring and analysis organization co-founded by a former Israeli military intelligence officer and an Israeli American political scientist. “We made them think that Hamas was busy with governing Gaza, and that it wanted to focus on the 2.5 million Palestinians [in Gaza], and has abandoned the resistance altogether.”
“All the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack,” Baraka continued. …
“The Israelis are known to love life. We, on the other hand, sacrifice ourselves. We consider our dead to be martyrs. The thing any Palestinian desires the most is to be martyred for the sake of Allah, defending his land,” he continued. “We have been preparing for this for two years.
A lot more than two years.
ADDENDUM: On reflection, I realize that I haven’t sufficiently made a basic point that I want to convey. Just to clarify: whether the story that babies were beheaded turns out ultimately to have been true or false, a fact such as that matters but in the end doesn’t matter as much as it would seem. We already know full well that Islamic terrorists such as those in ISIS, and the killers of Daniel Pearl so long ago, have often used beheading as a way to treat captives, and they have proudly made videos to show it. We also know that last Saturday, many women and children and even babies were purposely murdered in cold blood, in very grisly and tortuous ways and also in “ordinary” ways such as shooting young people enjoying themselves at a concert. We know that some families found out about the fate of their loved ones by the terrorists posting photos and/or videos of the killings on Facebook.
In summary, we know that enormous numbers of atrocities of so many kinds were committed that they almost could serve as a guidebook to what is euphemistically called “man’s inhumanity to man.” But for a host of different reasons, people want the horror to not be true. So many are trying to fasten on some small part of it that might be an exaggeration. But true or false, that small part doesn’t change the big picture, which is that what happened in Israel on Saturday at the hands of Hamas was an abomination, and that those who perpetrated it need to be stopped.
