Civilization weeps
The terrible fate of the Bibas family, and all of the other victims of Gazan Arab depravity, symbolizes the moral sickness of the West.
By Melanie Phillips
JNS
Feb 20, 2025
Hamas gunmen stand near coffins during the staged handover of deceased hostages Oded Lifschitz, Shiri Bibas and her two children Kfir and Ariel Bibas, before hundreds of onlookers in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, February 20, 2025.
After the heartbreak comes a profound anger. The return from Gaza of the bodies of the murdered Israeli hostages Shiri Bibas and her small children, 9-month-old Kfir and 4-year-old Ariel—after a grotesque Hamas propaganda stunt displaying their coffins and accusing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, of killing them—has triggered in the already deeply traumatized Israeli people a bottomless grief and a demand for justice at long last
Shiri’s parents, Yossi and Margit Silberman, were also murdered on Oct 7, 2023. The suffering of her husband Yarden, who was released from Hamas captivity only three weeks ago, is unconscionable.
Oded Lifshitz, aged 83, the fourth hostage whose body was returned with the Bibas family and who had made it part of his routine living near the Gaza border to drive countless Arabs from Gaza to hospital appointments in Israel, had his kindness repaid when they burned down his home, took him and his wife hostage and then murdered him.
The fate of all the other individuals slaughtered, raped, tortured, beheaded, burned alive and kidnapped into Gaza in the Oct. 7 atrocities is no less shattering.
But the terrified face of Shiri Bibas cradling her children as they were dragged into Gaza will haunt many of us forever. The Bibas family will remain a symbol of the unspeakable evil visited upon Israel on that black day and that it continues to confront.
It’s also a symbol of the West’s descent into inhumanity and its tacit endorsement of barbarism. In city after city, people whose faces were contorted with hatred and rage tore down posters of baby Kfir and other hostages from public places.
What kind of people feel such hatred and rage at pictures of babies, children, women and men who have been kidnapped by barbaric savages?
This was a mass outbreak of a collective pathology. It has illustrated the extent of the West’s crisis of civilization. And at the heart of that crisis lies the attitude to Israel and the Jewish people.
The hostage posters were torn down because for supporters of the Palestine cause, nothing can be allowed to challenge their narrative of hapless Palestinians and Israeli colonizers who drove them out of their ancient homeland and have oppressed them ever since.
Every part of that narrative is, of course, a lie. The Jews are the indigenous people of the land of Israel—the only people for whom it was ever their national kingdom. Palestinian identity is a fiction cooked up in the 1960s between the Egyptian-born “Palestinian” terrorist leader Yasser Arafat and the Soviet Union.
It was created not only to steal the homeland of the Jews from them but also to steal their own ancient history in the land, an essential element of Jewish national identity. Whatever supporters of this cause tell themselves, it’s therefore an attack on Judaism itself.
At the heart of this cause is the demonization of the Jews as Jews, an evil with which generations of “Palestinian” Arabs have been indoctrinated.
Palestinian terrorists carry one of the coffins said to carry the bodies of four slain Israeli hostages to the Red Cross in Khan Younis in the Gaza on February 20, 2025.
Hamas led the onslaught on Oct. 7, but Gaza’s civilians made up the majority of the barbarians who invaded Israel that day to slaughter and kidnap Jews. Yet Western liberals have howled for the past 16 months that these are innocent people being subjected to collective punishment.
The “Palestinian” cause, so thoroughly embedded in liberal Western culture, has knocked the West off its moral compass. The Palestinian narrative matters so much to those who tore the hostage posters down because this evil cause defines the “progressive” conscience.
This is the moral sickness of the West. As I write in my book, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West—and Why Only They Can Save It, this is the outcome of a culture whose intellectual elites have taken a hammer to its core values for decades, abolishing truth, conscience and reason itself.
U.S. President Donald Trump is fighting back against some of this with his multitudinous directives taking a blowtorch to the embedded orthodoxies of intersectionality, victim culture and national self-loathing.
However, his shocking and absurd claim that Ukraine started the war with Russia has caused consternation even among many of those prepared to cut him slack precisely because he is taking on the cultural nihilists of the left.
That’s because his remarks suggest that the monstrous reversal of aggressor and victim—an inversion at the heart of the Palestinian big lie—is not confined to the fantasy universe inhabited by the left. His embrace of the conspiracy-theorizing of former Fox News TV anchor Tucker Carlson that sanitizes Russian aggression is deeply alarming.
We don’t know whether Trump will end up benefiting Russia’s tyrannical president Vladimir Putin or producing peace with justice in Ukraine. But those looking to him to rescue America from the depredations of the left should not be blind to his flawed attitude to monstrous world leaders—his belief that in every conflict lies a potential deal to be negotiated in which he will emerge the victor.
Nevertheless, his exasperation with Europe freeloading off U.S. military protection is on the mark. Europe’s refusal to step up to the plate is itself the outcome of the cultural demoralization identified by Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference when he excoriated Europe for retreating from “some of its most fundamental values” and not realizing that the biggest threat it faced was from within itself.
The European Union is constitutionally unable to entertain the need for a serious military capability because it arose from the belief that Europe could never be trusted not to repeat the horrors of Nazi imperialism and world war.
Europe had come to believe that, especially in Germany, it was incurably given to aggression. This profound cultural demoralization accounts in large measure for its inability to hold the line for its own civilization against the attempt to destroy it both from within and without.
In other words, Europe’s military disarray in the face of what it itself identifies as intolerable Russian aggression is because Europe is an 80-year-old civilizational basket case.
To that extent, Vance was absolutely correct. But the crisis is much deeper and wider than the issues he identified of free speech, mass migration or even criminalizing Christian “conscience rights “ over abortion or religious “thought crime.”
The United States, no less than Britain and Europe, has become riddled by systematic indoctrination in anti-Western propaganda proclaiming its original sins of colonialism, racism and “white privilege,” and where conservatives have been literally and metaphorically strong-armed off campus.
America, no less than Britain and Europe, has for decades helped fund Palestinian indoctrination in murderous hatred of the Jews.
America, no less than Britain and Europe, has for decades perpetrated the illusion of a “two-state solution,” denying the genocidal jihadi nature of the Palestinian cause and bullying Israel into weakening its ability to defend itself—a process that led inexorably to the massacres in southern Israel on Oct. 7.
America, Britain, Europe, Canada and Australia have all hosted rampant and brazen antisemitic attacks, with their mainstream media promulgating murderous lies about Israel week in, week out.
And across the West, its elites continue to deny and excuse Islamist extremism and Muslim Jew-hatred, while denouncing all who call this out as “Islamophobic.”
This crisis has been caused by the West’s retreat from its core values based in Christianity but which ultimately derive from Judaism. The people tearing down the hostage posters were tearing the Jews out of their sight, out of their conscience and out of their world.
This is why the fate of the Israeli hostages is a crisis for the West. Challenged by the Oct. 7 atrocities to defend civilization against barbarism, it did not defend civilization.
Enough.
The coffins of the Bibas children, coupled
with the West’s collusion with the depraved population that willed
their extermination along with the extinction of Israel, tell us that
the Jewish people must rediscover their historic calling of justice
through strength and abandon their attempts to satisfy a West that no
longer deserves to survive.
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