Media Use Hostages as Rallying Cry against Israel

The Western media have turned the hostages into a rallying cry against Israel. It has become so routine that we almost take it for granted nowadays: the hostages are a by-word for victim-blaming, not for criminals-blaming.

The operational demands are never directed any longer against the vicious hostage-takers – Hamas, and by implication, all of the Islamist terrorist movements. Instead they are always directed against the targeted victim: Israel and, by implication, the U.S. as well. The hatred is directed not against Hamas but against the Israeli government. It has become so habitual that, whenever anyone hears the word “hostages”, the image it conjures up – after “the poor hostages” – is, “another point is being scored against Israel.”

The media have worked to help mobilize many of the hostage families to join them in this travesty. Their work has been diligent, but also routine; it comes to them by ideological instinct.

It is not surprising that many of the hostages and their families are ready to provide the performance role that the media seek from them. The hostages are mostly southern kibbutzim, people who still live by the ways of the communes that were inspired by the utopian ideology of the Left end of the Israeli political spectrum. Many were at a peacenik postmodernist dance festival when they were attacked, murdered, and taken hostage. They had invited Gazans to work in their homes and fields, where the Gazans had gathered intelligence for the attack.

They have never been told that they should accept some of the responsibility for the terrible consequences of their “peace-loving” open doors policy. They have never had it put to them forcefully that virtue signaling is the opposite of true virtue, or that they bear some guilt for that before their society. Instead they have been feted as purely innocent victims — innocent  of blame, innocent of any guilt before Hamas, for the very reason that they were innocent of any honest realism about Hamas.

But what about guilt before Israel? What about guilt before their fellow victims of the terror? This is not counted. It is as if guilt before Hamas is the only thing our media are able to feel.

Despite this failure of society to exerise a conscience over the hostages and their families, a few of them have shown that they have learned better from the experience. Almost none have yet drawn serious, consistent conclusions, but perhaps that will come with time. Or perhaps not.

Too many of them have, not surprisingly, done the opposite: they have dived deeper into their ideology of blaming Israel for whatever went wrong this time. Many in their families have the same ideological orientation.

And then the media come along to the families. They give the families heavy incentives to play along and undermine Israel’s military and bargaining positions: it is the way they can get good air time, with ample sympathy for their pain – a genuine pain, to be sure, unlike the media’s sympathy which is ideological – and with nothing but words of praise and friendly leading questions for their stance against the Israeli government. It is a form of Stockholm Syndrome: helplessly accept the perspective of your captors and hope they get their way so they’ll release you on their own terms.

In the case of the media, this translates as: your families must serve our cause and go along with your family captors, because we’re all holding you hostage too. We join the hostage-takers to put pressure on you to help their cause. If you go along and cry some tears at the right point to serve for pressure on Israel, then we will then shed more tears for you and give you some real voice to express your pain before the world.

The media turn it into an all-pervasive, 24-7 pressure to yield to Stockholm Syndrome.

What is remarkable is that not that many hostage families have yielded to this pressure, but that some of the hostage families have held out from it. And not only held out but have courageously stood up against it. They have argued back against Hamas and the media, and have supported Israel in its decision finally to fight Hamas for real this time.

The courageous ones are the true conscience of our society. The ones who go along with evil, in order to get boosted by the media as an ersatz conscience over and above our society, have been sadly shorn by the media and the progressive intelligentsia of the normal moral faculty of a true conscience: the faculty of having a conscience before their society.

It is the conscience before society that comes first. It is what one must have in a strong, matured manner, before one can sometimes feel legitimately called upon to exercise a sense of conscience over against society.

The courageous hostage families who stand up to Hamas and the media are the ones who have their conscience in good order. May they be blessed from on high.