Brendan O'Neill: The deaths of these hostages shames the Western conscience

It is time to call out Western liberals’ craven silence in the face of Hamas’s fascism.

The discovery of the bodies of six Israeli hostages in a tunnel in Rafah confirms what many of us knew about Hamas – that it is a Jew-killing machine that masquerades as a national-liberation movement. That it has no purpose beyond the persecution and slaughter of the Jewish people. That its aim, for all the crowing of its useful idiots in the West about ‘resistance’ and ‘decolonisation’, is nothing more and nothing less than the fascistic terrorising of the inhabitants of the Jewish State. The ‘brutal murder’ of these six people, their only crime their Jewishness, is the bloodiest proof yet that in Hamas Israel faces not only a military foe, but also a virulently racist, existential threat.

But the discovery of the slain Jews shines a harsh light on other people, too. Not just Hamas, but also us, the West, and especially that portion of it that calls itself ‘progressive’. When I saw the photos of the four men and two women killed by their captors in a dank lair in Rafah, I thought to myself: there are people in my community here in the UK who have defaced posters of these people. There are people on my streets who scrawled the word ‘coloniser’ on their faces. There are people in my profession who described the day they were kidnapped as a ‘day of celebration’. There are people in London – and New York, Berlin, Sydney – who expressed solidarity not with these six seized Jews, but with the racists who seized them.

And it made me think: it is not enough today to condemn Hamas. We must also ask how so many in the West came to share in Hamas’s twisted, bigoted hatred for these six human beings. Why so many in the West made excuses for their abduction, vandalised their likenesses and falsely called their persecution ‘resistance’. The barbarism uncovered in Rafah is on Hamas. But the Western conscience is not wholly innocent of this depraved crime.

Let us be clear: the horror in Rafah is what some progressives in the West felt ‘exhilarated’ by, it’s what they ‘celebrated’. This is Hamas, this is its ‘resistance’. All six, according to the IDF, were ‘brutally murdered’ a ‘short time’ before being found. They were: Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, an Israeli-American; Alexander Lobanov, a 32-year-old father of two; Carmel Gat, a 40-year-old from Tel Aviv who was visiting her parents in the Be’eri kibbutz on the day of the 7 October pogrom; Almog Sarusi, a 27-year-old who loved ‘travelling around Israel in his white SUV with his guitar’; Eden Yerushalmi, a 24-year-old who was bartending at the Nova music festival; and Ori Danino, 25, who was about to embark on an electrical-engineering course when he was seized.

All displayed extraordinary heroism in the face of Hamas’s fascistic onslaught against the Jewish State on 7 October 2023. Alexander Lobanov helped to evacuate people from the Nova festival before running with five others into the Be’eri forest, where Hamas captured him. Hersh Goldberg-Polin took refuge with others in a bomb shelter. When Hamas’s killers lobbed grenades in, in an effort to butcher the Jews within, he grabbed them and threw them back out. One of his arms was blown off. Ori Danino made it out of the Nova festival but then he went back to help others and he was captured.

Almog Sarusi was captured because he stayed by his girlfriend’s side after she was shot and severely injured. She later died and he was taken, his love for his girl landing him in the hateful arms of Hamas. Carmel Gat was described as a ‘guardian angel’ by freed hostages: they told of how she taught them yoga and meditation to help them ‘endure captivity’. And Eden Yerushalmi called police on 7 October and described in detail what was happening at the Nova festival before she herself was captured. Her final words were: ‘Find me, okay?’

Now this is resistance. Unprepared, unarmed, these six young people did what they could to resist the anti-Semitic savagery of the invading army from Gaza. They repelled its grenades, rescued some of its intended targets, tended to the victims of its racist sadism. They didn’t ask for war, they didn’t expect war, they didn’t deserve war. But when it came, brutishly intruding on their kibbutzim and parties, they took action that helped to minimise the Jewish people’s suffering. It is a testament to Western radicals’ swirling moral disarray and their detachment from civilisational values that they referred to the racist invaders of Israel as the ‘resistance’, and the Jewish heroes who fought back as ‘colonisers’.

But this goes beyond foolish ‘left’ apologism for Hamas. It goes beyond excuse-making for terror. There is a case to be made that the self-styled progressive conscience of the West has not been complacent in the face of Hamas’s barbarism, but complicit. Many in the West played an active role in justifying the kidnapping of people like Goldberg-Polin, Lobanov, Gat, Sarusi, Yerushalmi and Danino. They actively bolstered the kidnappers’ claims to be resistance fighters, and they actively prevented the raising of awareness of the kidnap victims, particularly through the destruction of posters featuring their faces. They were more than bystanders to a pogrom – they were unpaid PR men for the pogromists.

Consider the feral mobs of anti-Semites that clawed kidnap posters off public buildings and lampposts. The six dead of Rafah will have been on some of those posters. Indeed, in April, in Melbourne, Australia, a huge ‘Bring Them Home’ mural featuring the face of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, among others, was graffitied by anti-Israel agitators. They daubed ‘FREE PALESTINE’ in massive letters over his face and the faces of the other stolen Jews.

This rash, racist allergy to any awareness-raising of the Israeli hostages was pure spin for Hamas. In destroying the posters, or daubing them with sh*t, or scribbling ‘coloniser’ on them, Western Israelophobes were slavishly amplifying Hamas’s insistence that these people are not innocent. That they deserve persecution. That you absolutely should not sympathise with, and in fact you should hate, the likes of those six young men and women who were held and brutalised and murdered in Rafah. That people in the West, in virtually every major city, assisted in Hamas’s dehumanisation of the Jews in its captivity should chill us to the bone.

Or consider the frenzied ‘radical’ hostility to any effort by Israel to rescue its seized citizens. It is just three months since the social-media craze of ‘All Eyes on Rafah’. Nearly 50million people, including celebs, shared that slogan on Instagram, the aim being to condemn Israel for even thinking about sending troops into Rafah. We now know that that is where the six hostages, and others, were being held in rank, repulsive conditions. We now know Hamas was using Rafah as a base for attacking Israel. ‘All Eyes on Rafah’ was no progressive cry – it was an act of woke appeasement. ‘Leave Rafah to Hamas’, was the sick undertone of this reckless trend. Not content with defiling images of the six young Israelis interned in Rafah, the virtuous of the West then raged against military action that might have led to their rescue. They made themselves the defenders of Hamas’s wicked dominion over Rafah.

Kamala Harris has questions to answer here. She’s issued a welcome, angry statement on the slaughter of the six hostages, describing it as ‘an outrage’. And yet for months she sternly instructed Israel not to launch a ‘major military operation’ in Rafah. There will be ‘consequences’, she warned. It is now known that in Rafah, an American citizen was being held captive. Now killed. Is this the first time in history an American leader warned of ‘consequences’ over the rescue of an American rather than over the kidnap of an American? As National Review summarises it, ‘Kamala Harris warned Israel of “consequences” if it invaded Rafah, where Hamas just murdered an American hostage’.

Here’s the only question that matters right now: are Jewish lives worth fighting for? Some of us think they are. Others, from the top of politics to the frenzied anti-Semites on the streets, seem to think otherwise. It is tempting to see the West’s moral disorder over Israel-Hamas as a consequence of that old problem, ‘the sleep of reason’, the sleep of our conscience. But in truth, the West’s conscience has been wide awake, and excitable, and noisy, and it has sided not with kidnapped Jews, but with their kidnappers. Let us hope the memory of the six slain will be a blessing – and let us hope their deaths will be a lesson for a West that seems utterly morally lost.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.