Hamas Supporters Have Blood On Their Hands

Does anyone remember former NFL football player Michael Vick? A gifted athlete, his career came to a screaming halt when he was convicted, and sentenced to 23 months in a federal prison, arising out of participation in dog-fighting. Yet the same types of people who would not countenance such cruelty to animals are perfectly fine when it is committed on Jews.

You’ve probably seen this recent image or another like it:

Demonstrators displaying the message “Free Gaza” raise their hands in the air during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing to examine the national security supplemental request, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on October 31, 2023. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP)

This brings to mind another, more famous, image.

(photo credit: screen capture, YouTube)

This image, though, is not of “peaceful” protesters. It is from 23 years ago, of Aziz Salha, who waves his bloodstained hands to a cheering crowd after murdering two inexperienced ununiformed Israeli reservists who took a wrong turn into Ramallah on October 12, 2000.

The odds are very high that the “Free Gaza” protesters have no concept of the irony of their meaning of their bloody hands nor of the effect that it has on those who see it. These protesters, and the thousands of other “Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea” chanters, are cheering for the vicious, premeditated – and gleeful – murder and maiming of Jews solely because they are Jews.

What stains the psyche, even more than the stained hands of these murder-supporters, is that Hamas did not merely deliberately commit war crimes of attacking civilians on October 7; it is the way they did it, with aggravated brutal cruelty and torture. And with aforethought – this was not individuals caught up in the heat of the moment; the cruelty and torture were the plan from the beginning, what the terrorists were trained and instructed to perform.

Why such vicious bloodthirstiness? How could any human perform such acts? How could an entire society not only perform them, but be celebrated by its supporters around the world, passing out sweets and in demonstrations? How could protesters appear in public, much less in Congress, wearing red hands that, at least ignorantly and more likely intentionally, honor that cruelty and call for more of it?

More irony: Lately folks have been sending me this video thinking it relates to the war that began with Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack. The sad and remarkable thing is that it actually was broadcast in 2014, nine years ago – yet it could have been broadcast yesterday. Nine years later, and the same people are saying the same things. Gazans and other Palestinians are still taught the same hate in their schools – and they grow up to translate that hate into the inhuman capability to commit the heinous, savage acts that occurred on October 7. No supposedly “pro-Palestinian” supporter has learned a thing – and nothing has changed.

The red-handed protesters are beyond reprehensible. If they truly cared about Palestinian lives, even as they disregard Jewish ones, they would be protesting against Hamas, not for it. They would be demanding that Hamas cease using ordinary Gazans as human shields. They would be insisting and advocating for an end to teaching hate, an end to the Hamas Charter that sets killing Jews as one of its fundamental principles.

But these people don’t really care about Gazans any more than Hamas does. Hamas television appearances openly admit that Hamas intentionally seeks to use Gazans as martyrs, and assert that it is the U.N., not Hamas, that has the obligation to protect the Gazan population. Hamas supporters like the bloody-handed protesters never attack Hamas for the way it uses the people that the protesters claim to support.

One more irony – it turns out that most pro-Israel supporters are more pro-Palestinian than these obscene protesters. Unlike the protesters, most pro-Israel supporters agree with a two-state solution, want the Palestinians to have a thriving culture and to rise out of poverty and deprivation. But that is impossible as long as people like the “Free Gaza” red-handed protesters control the narrative and give cover to grisly Hamas leadership.

Thus, while they are probably too sick to notice it, the protesters depicted above truly do have blood on their hands – both Palestinian and Israeli blood. They certainly have no moral high ground. Instead, these same people, who would denounce the Michael Vicks of the world without hesitation, are a major reason that the conflict continues, unchanged, for all of these years. Until the general public and the political class understand this and unequivocally reject the kind of hypocrisy inherent in their narrative, more unnecessary blood will be spilled – and it will be the fault of the bloody-handed protesters.