BLUF
Although I don’t believe any society is irredeemable,
[I believe there are such, this one for sure]
to ask Israelis to take another chance on genocidal maniacs next door is unfair. Consequently, the only option left is that Gazans should be absorbed by the nations that have supported them over the previous decades.
A Macabre Cultural Confession
The recent hostage release by Hamas was turned into a macabre public spectacle which in truth amounted to a projection/confession of their own guilt and savagery.
In an attempt to make sense of his country’s backwardness vis-à-vis the West, the nineteenth century Russian poet and ardent Slavophile — a proponent of his country’s unique path in history — Fyodor Tyutchev wrote:
“Russia can’t be comprehended by mind./She can’t be measured by a common yardstick./One can only know Russia./Only believe in Russia.”
More than a century later, Russians are still prone to evoke these verses whenever something goes awry in their country. Yet I think Tyutchev was wrong — rational foreigners can grasp Russia by making use of their cognitive faculties. Compare it, for instance, to an entity that is wholly alien to reason — the Gaza Strip.
Gazan hostage and human corpse release pageants give a pause to even the most rabid champions of antizionism in the West. The terrorist group Hamas paraded the limping, famished and frightened men and women, and forced them to pose against the backdrop of propaganda banners. And after egging on the menacing crowd against the people who spent five hundred days in their dungeons, they distributed goody bags and even forced one Israeli to kiss his captor.
The coffin transfers were even more macabre — Hamas played cheerful music, audience members turned out to enjoy the occasion with hookah pipes, and children bounced around joyfully. Naturally, Gaza barbarity didn’t stop there — terrorists released the coffins from their possession filled with propaganda materials and without keys.
This level of cruelty is to be expected from the people who orchestrated — and spent a year and a half celebrating — the Simchat Torah Massacre in southern Israel. What’s surprising is that their sadism is not at all cerebral.
The hostage parades were co-produced with the Qatari news conglomerate Al Jazeera. One would hope that the journalists supposedly working for the Arab CNN should be sophisticated enough to realize that an average Western viewer will find the spectacle repulsive.
If the show was intended to convey menacing messages to their neighbors and bring out the most heinous instincts among their own people, it met the mark. Yet explain why the signage behind the captives had English slogans on them. Did the authors of this Hamas/Al Jazeera collaboration think that they could woo first world audiences this way? Sure, over the decades, terrorist organizations have gotten away with quite a few clumsy lies, but when your average English-speaking media consumer can plainly see when a starved hostage is being ordered around by armed captors, Gaza is clearly not winning any friends.
Moreover, your average Western media consumer understands that forensic science can determine cause of death with great accuracy. Gazans did an amateurish job mutilating the corpses of the redheaded Bibas babies which they abducted from Israel alongside their mother.
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