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| Ariel, Shiri, and Kfir Bibas murdered in captivity by Hamas |
As I’ve said from the very beginning - and numerous times since - Meir Kahane’s views about the Palestinian mindset with respect to Israel were exactly on target. He was prescient. Most rational people considered him an extremist with extremist views. Well he was an extremist. But his belief about their mindset appears to be becoming mainstream.
Please do not misunderstand me. I did not and do not endorse his tactics or rhetoric, all of which are reprehensible. But when it comes to understanding what Palestinians really want, more people are beginning to realize what Kahane already knew decades ago. It’s just too bad that it took the events of October 7th to wake everyone else up to this reality.
Even so, how can I be so sure that Kahane was right about that? It is after all humanly impossible to know exactly what is on the mind of an entire people. Only God can know that. But when there is a convergence of opinion from sources as disparate as Reform Rabbi Amiel Hirsch, Ben Shapiro and Laurence Bolotin, there has to be a reason. When they are all saying a version of what Kahane said decades ago, we had better believe it, lest we pay the ultimate price as a people.
The turning point may have come at different times and after
different events, but the moral clarity that Kahane had on this issue remains
the same. I had always trusted Kahane’s wisdom on this issue. But I used to
think that peace could nevertheless be achieved by virtue of the realities of
Israel’s proven might. That the Palestinians people would prefer peace and prosperity to death and
destruction. But as October 7th taught me, that is clearly not the case.
The turning point for the more liberal Jews among us has
come now, in the aftermath of the cold-blooded murder of the Bibas children by
their Hamas abductors - via strangulation, by hand!
Here is what conservative pundit, Ben Shapiro said:
"This week, the world was reminded of the deep and abiding evil that has wormed its way to the center of Palestinian nationalistic culture by the news that the Bibas family — a mother, Shiri; a 4-year-old boy, Ariel; and his 9-month-old brother, Kfir...
They were not, in fact, kidnapped by identified members of Hamas. They were kidnapped by Palestinians in civilian dress, who joined Hamas for their murderous spree. For over a year, zero Palestinians apparently revealed the whereabouts of the Bibas family to the Israelis; zero worked to keep them safe or to restore them to liberty.
This fits with a pattern of civilian involvement in Palestinian terror activity: The reality is that the Palestinian terror apparatus is incestuously intertwined with the Palestinian civilian population. That is why released hostages tell of being held by civilian families in Gaza; why terrorists merge so easily into the surrounding civilian population; why the popularity of Palestinian terrorist groups remains sky-high among Palestinians generally. The hard division between terrorist and civilian so cherished by the West simply doesn’t exist in practice in places like the Gaza Strip."
If Shapiro is too conservative to your liking, read what Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch said:
"Something snapped in me this week," said Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, the senior rabbi at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City…
"It is what the Bibas family symbolizes—the concretization and normalization of pure evil in the face of pure innocence—that finally crushed me this week...
"A community that condones the murder of infants and toddlers, a people that is not horrified by the savagery, the cheers, the parading of infant remains, is desperately troubled and suffering from moral miasma and social collapse," he declared. "Palestinianism is infused with fantasies of conquest and mythologies of victimhood, fueling an endless cycle of violent depravity, in part encouraged and even funded by perhaps well-meaning but naive Western politicians and NGOs, and glamorized by armchair revolutionaries whose fervor increases the further they are from Gaza."
That’s right. Ammiel Hirsch, a Reform rabbi whose movement is among the most liberal/left in the Jewish world (if not the entire world), is echoing what Meir Kahane said all those many years ago! To quote Ben Shapiro, "Sometimes, moral clarity isn’t difficult."
We now know with relative certainty that, no matter how futile the task, Palestinians prefer death and destruction of even their own people in pursuit of expelling the Jewish people from ‘their’ own land - over the peace and prosperity having their own state next to Israel would bring them.
Those who naïvely say that Israel’s destruction of Gaza in its war against Hamas has produced more terrorists (and there are a lot of well-meaning people who believe this) remain clueless to the reality Meir Kahane knew was true all along. Only now a lot more people realize this.
And yet, except for the U.S. (especially now under a president who also understands this), the rest of the world (united under an abomination called the UN) clings to the false notion that a two-state solution is the only path forward. I guess moral clarity is something Europeans don’t possess. And never did as was evident in their collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Finally, there is this op-ed in the Chicago Tribune
by Laurence Bolotin, a former board member of the American Jewish
Committee (one of the most progressive Jewish organizations in America). He had
this to say:
"The images of (the murdered Bibas children being returned) to Israel should shake us to our core. They should force us to confront not only the brutality of their deaths but also the moral vacuum that allows such horrors to be met with indifference. When the killing of children no longer provokes outrage—when the world’s response is muted, conditional, or absent altogether—it speaks to something deeply broken in our collective conscience.
There was a time when we did not ask what flag they were born under before deciding whether their deaths were worth mourning. There was a time when the idea of children being slaughtered in their homes, at a festival, in a war zone, or in a school would bring us together in sorrow and anger. But today, the moral clarity that once guided us seems eroded by political narratives, selective empathy, and a deep-seated fear of taking a stand.
The silence surrounding these deaths is not accidental. It is cultivated. It is born out of a reluctance to acknowledge suffering that does not fit neatly into a preferred narrative. It is maintained by the fear of being accused of taking the wrong side—as if the murder of children is ever a matter of political debate rather than a fundamental moral failing."
Indeed! Need I say more?
