THE WORLD STILL CONSIDERS JEWS EXPENDABLE - Israel must demand humanitarianism for the kidnapped hostages
By: Joseph Puder
Friday, January 12, 2024
When it comes to Jews being victimized the world is taking a nonchalant attitude. After all, Jews have been persecuted in Christian Europe and Muslim Arab world for almost two-millenniums.
The Holocaust, during WWII created some introspection in the Christian world and among some European leaders, they vowed to combat the antisemitism that led to the Holocaust.
The moratorium over Jew-hatred ended a while ago, and it is no longer politically incorrect to ignore Jewish pain, discrimination, and acts of antisemitism, as can be seen on US and overseas campuses.
The deliberate and gruesome massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023, along with the inexcusable kidnapping of mostly 240 Israeli civilians from their homes, and Israel’s subsequent defensive actions are being marginalized by an insidious moral equivalency against Israel regarding the plight of Palestinians in Gaza. Yet, it is no secret that Hamas is using these Palestinian civilians as human shields, while many Gazans are willing partners.
The anguish and plight of the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas terrorists into Gaza’s dungeons is increasingly overlooked. Some have already died in captivity due to Hamas’ torture, deliberate denial of food and medicine. These young and old, male, and female kidnapped hostages have been placed in dark cages, and nothing is known about their condition due to the reluctance of the Red Cross to take an aggressive stance against Hamas’ deliberate cruelty.
Families of the kidnapped Israelis have marched towards Kerem Shalom, the border point with Gaza, where the trucks are bringing humanitarian aid to the Palestinians in Gaza. They are protesting against the blatant discrimination against their loved ones (an estimated 136) who have been languishing in sub-human conditions, overseen by the sadistic Hamas terrorists in Gaza for over 100 days! The families are demanding “humanitarianism for humanitarianism,” and aim to block the entry of trucks to Gaza until similar humanitarian consideration is given to their husbands, children, sisters, and brothers.
Many of the kidnapped Israeli hostages are elderly with endemic health problems, who have been denied visitation by the Red Cross. Nothing is known about their situation; whether they are alive or not, whether they are getting critical medicines or basic food and drink to sustain them. From the testimonies of the returned hostages, it is clear that the hostages are being tortured, females are being harassed sexually if not raped, and food and drinks are sparse and insufficient to sustain life.
The international community, the United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU) and, even the Biden administration, have not put any visible pressure on Qatar and Hamas to allow Red Cross doctors and nurses to visit the Israeli hostages. Clearly, if the Israelis acted in the same way, the world would demand intensive intervention.
What we are seeing, with the Palestinians receiving international support including food clothing, and fuel (which Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad [PIJ] are expropriating), while the Israeli hostages are denied the most elementary aid is nothing but the application of double standards and antisemitism.
Jewish communities worldwide are noting the deliberate obfuscation of the brutal massacres of Israelis in the ‘Gaza adjacent’ Israeli communities by the international community.
At the UN there are calls to condemn Israel for “genocide in Gaza,” while demanding an immediate ceasefire and Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. This despite Israel’s right under international law to defend itself against such terrorists’ attacks from Gaza as occurred on October 7.
In western capitals, including the US, pro-Hamas demonstrators are disrupting political campaigns and creating mayhem in the streets of New York, Washington, and elsewhere. President Biden’s speech in Charleston, SC was disrupted by pro-Hamas protesters calling for “ceasefire in Gaza now,” and Biden, obviously intimidated, responded apologetically that he is seeking Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza.
The voices of the families of the kidnapped Israelis, and those of the survivors of the worst pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust, are overwhelmed by the Jew-hating crowds and, by the blatant absence of condemnation from international women’s organization in the aftermath of the brutal rapes of Israeli women by Hamas, which constitute a clear war crime under international law.
The Jewish community in Rome, Italy issued a statement that expressed disgust over the “Complicit silence and double standards that continue to pollute public statements on the war in Israel and Gaza,” sparked by the Hamas attacks of October 7. “We would have expected unequivocal statements on the horrors committed by the terrorist organization Hamas, which is still holding 136 Jewish hostages. It is scandalous to put the defensive war of a country (Israel) and a people that suffered a mass antisemitic attack on October 7 on the same level as the meticulous Jew-hunt involving the deliberate killing of 1,400 people including children…”
How can one not see the existence of double standards when one hears calls demanding Israel stop the war in Gaza while not demanding that the Israeli hostages be freed?
Furthermore, Canada’s National Post reported (November 1, 2023) that a Senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad told Lebanon’s LBC-TV that the terror group would continue to carry out massacres like the one it carried out in southern Israel on October 7, until the Jewish state is destroyed.
Israel has not only the legal right to eliminate the Hamas threat against the state and the people of Israel, but the moral justification to protect its people from such an evil Jew-hating foe.
The Jewish people in Israel are no longer the “sheep to be slaughtered” as happened during the Holocaust. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) is committed to defend its people by all means possible. Conditioning humanitarian aid for Gaza in exchange for aid to the innocent Israeli hostages must be a priority.