Hamas brutally killed child hostages. How can anyone defend that?

To live as a Jew, you “must be sensitive to the tremors that warn of impending earthquakes that could make our current homes dangerous,” Alana Newhouse wrote.

She wrote that in November 2022, less than a year before the next earthquake.

“At different points in our history, that (home) was Spain, England, France, Turkey, Cairo, Baghdad, Beirut, Safed, Vilna, Warsaw, Prague, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and too many others to count,” wrote Newhouse, editor-in-chief of Tablet, a Jewish magazine of news and culture.

“In all of those places, things got bad at some point; in some of them, so bad that they became irrevocably broken to us.”

Bibas boys were defining image of Oct. 7 attack

On Tuesday, the entire world must have seemed “irrevocably broken” to every Jewish man and woman.

At least, for any who had watched a particular video, and that probably accounts for just about all.

Because any who had seen those boys, those precious boys with ginger hair and searching eyes, with only a blanket and their mother’s arms to shield them from the circling wolves, had to feel their hopes, their hearts, collapse on Tuesday.

So many had awaited the fate of those children and their mother, Shiri Bibas, who was last seen holding her boys in her arms on Oct. 7, 2023.

In the now famous video, Shiri’s eyes are different than her two sons’. They bespeak pure terror, the knowledge that the Arabic speaking men kicking down doors and firing guns in her neighborhood would now decide the fate of her children, Ariel, 4; and 9-month-old Kfir.

This week that fate became more apparent.

Hamas returns bodies of 2 boys and their mother

The wolves who carry AK-47s and hide their faces with black hoods and shield themselves with the women and children of Gaza informed Israel that they would be returning the remains of Shiri and her two boys.

For Jews, the dots are connecting again, from the pogroms of Odessa to the ovens of Auschwitz to, now, the massacres of kibbutzim Israel.

The worst, the most vicious creatures on earth, are once again preying on the Jews.

Not just mutilating and murdering them, but killing their children, their infants and toddlers, babies who in happier moments are seen in photographs with delicate fingers and smiles — posing no threat or insult to any decent human being.

If you are Jewish, your mind must be whirring today, wondering how it is that evil so frequently finds your people — making them, as Alana Newhouse describes, a kind of seismograph for the collapse of civilized society.

And knowing that when it happens, the monsters will find sympathetic allies across the Christian and Muslim worlds. They will not blame the killers in balaclavas who don’t have the guts to show their faces while they exult in bloody deeds.

Instead, they’ll blame the victims, the babies and their mothers and their grandparents, who in the case of Ariel and Kfir, were murdered by Hamas.

Jews have seen too many innocents murdered

The historic persecution of the Jews haunts anyone who cares about humanity because it is incomprehensible.

The same murder of innocents has played out so many times over history that it isn’t possible to comprehend so much pain and anguish — there are too many Jewish mothers whose worst fears were realized.

So, the Jews despair in watching the Bibas children, giggling at the camera in earlier family videos and photos, prancing around in costume, knowing those children are headed for the clutches of Hamas.

Much of the western world today blames Israel for the carnage of the Israel-Hamas war. They refuse to acknowledge that Israel had no choice but to attack a terrorist army that killed some 1,200 of their people.

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Israel either fights back, or more babies, more mothers, more grandparents become the targets of the next attack, the one Hamas promises is coming.

Western leaders and activists accuse the Israelis of committing genocide in the siege of Gaza, when it is obvious that Hamas turned their own Palestinian women and children and Israeli hostages into human shields — a depraved act by almost any standard.

How can anyone defend how Hamas uses children?

These are not difficult moral questions to sort through. The logic is simple to deduce. Hamas killed Israeli children with guns and knives. They killed Palestinian children with cold indifference.

They wanted the Israelis to retaliate and shoot Palestinian civilians so they could feed the bodies to their propagandists and perpetuate the lie that Israel is a cruel and illegitimate state.

To ignore those facts, to ignore the simple logic and to lift your banner in support of Hamas — the real killers of innocent men, women and children on both sides of this conflict — is not just a continuum in the long history of Jewish persecution.

It is its own crime against humanity.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Bibas family is dead, and Jews are rightly in anguish | Opinion