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Catherine Perez-Shakdam

The Silence That Betrays Us All

Courtesy of Catherine Perez-Shakdam - Executive Director We Believe In Israel
Courtesy of Catherine Perez-Shakdam - Executive Director We Believe In Israel

We live in a world where words have lost their meaning, where moral clarity has been reduced to a parlour game for the idle and the spineless. And so, a mother, a father, and two innocent children are stolen from their home, wrenched from the safety of their lives by the very embodiment of human depravity—and the world carries on, unbothered, too distracted by its own self-serving righteousness to so much as mutter the only words that should matter: Bring them back.

The fate of the Bibas family should have been enough to rouse the civilised world from its stupor. Two small boys, Kfir and Ariel, aged ten months and four years old, torn from the embrace of their mother and father. Infants taken captive, their cries swallowed by the darkness of Hamas’s terror tunnels. Their parents, Yarden and Shiri, brutalised, humiliated, forced into a world where the only certainty is suffering. If there were ever a moment for universal outrage, for great nations to rise in furious unison and demand their immediate release, this was it.

And yet.

Instead of moral clarity, we are met with cowardice, apathy, and wilful deceit. Instead of a global demand for justice, we are treated to ludicrous accusations of genocide, absurd cries of famine, and a grotesque inversion of reality, where Israel—the very nation desperately trying to save its citizens—is cast as the villain.

The UN, with its self-appointed role as the arbiter of international virtue, has found the time to pass resolutions condemning Israel, yet has offered no meaningful action to secure the return of the Bibas family or the over 130 hostages still languishing in Gaza’s abyss. The so-called humanitarians, those ever eager to compose heart-wrenching statements on suffering and oppression, have remained deafeningly silent when the victims are Jewish children.

One cannot help but notice a pattern. It is not simply that the world has abandoned these hostages—it is that it cannot bring itself to acknowledge their innocence.

To recognise the innocence of Jewish children would require something too many are unwilling to give: courage. It would mean looking at the terror of October 7th and stating, without equivocation, that what was done to them, what was done to the Bibas family, was an unforgivable crime. That their suffering is not contextual, not nuanced, not “complicated”—it is an atrocity, plain and simple.

But doing so would demand action. It would mean standing up against the Hamas apologists, the street mobs calling for “resistance,” the sneering academics twisting history into grotesque justifications for murder. It would mean admitting that before the unspeakable violence of terror, one must risk everything to fight it—or lose to it forever.

And so, instead, the world closes its eyes and changes the subject. It finds refuge in false equivalence, as if hostages and hostage-takers are merely participants in some tragic misunderstanding. It screams of humanitarian aid while ignoring that Hamas, the very architects of Gaza’s misery, seized and hoarded it for themselves. It pretends that Hamas does not use hospitals as military bases, that it does not murder its own people to preserve its war narrative, that it does not delight in the suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians alike.

It is easier, after all, to blame Israel than to face the monstrous truth.

We have been told, over and over again, that compassion is a universal virtue, that justice must be blind and even-handed. But this is a lie. The world is not an equitable place—not when compassion is extended as a shield to the vile and the depraved, while the innocent are left to rot.

Would we be having this conversation if the Bibas family were British? If they were American? Would international institutions still be hesitating, equivocating, stumbling over themselves to appease the monsters who took them?

No.

Because deep down, despite all their professed principles, the institutions of the world have absorbed a lesson as old as history itself: Jewish suffering is acceptable. It is to be tolerated, debated, dissected, understood—but never urgently addressed. It is a footnote, an inconvenience in the grander narrative of geopolitical “balance.”

The world has chosen its side, and it is the side of moral relativism, where there is no good or evil—only power, only expedience, only the ability to twist language until murderers become “freedom fighters” and victims become an afterthought.

But Israel, and those who still have the clarity to see, must make a different choice. We must not lower our voices in the hope of being understood by a world that has already chosen to misunderstand us. We must speak louder, act fiercer, and stand stronger, not because we expect fairness, but because we refuse to let our own fall into the abyss without a fight.

The world is not lost yet. But it is very close.

History will record who stood in silence, who looked away, who masked their cowardice as “diplomacy.” And it will record, too, who dared to speak, who dared to fight, who dared to say the only words that should have mattered from the start:

Bring. Them. Home.



About the Author
Catherine Perez-Shakdam - Director Forward Strategy and Executive Director Forum of Foreign Relations (FFR) Catherine is a former Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society and consultant for the UNSC on Yemen, as well an expert on Iran, Terror and Islamic radicalisation. A prominent political analyst and commentator, she has spoken at length on the Islamic Republic of Iran, calling on the UK to proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist organisation. Raised in a secular Jewish family in France, Catherine found herself at the very heart of the Islamic world following her marriage to a Muslim from Yemen. Her experience in the Middle East and subsequent work as a political analyst gave her a very particular, if not a rare viewpoint - especially in how one can lose one' sense of identity when confronted with systemic antisemitism. Determined to share her experience and perspective on those issues which unfortunately plague us -- Islamic radicalism, Terror and Antisemitism Catherine also will speak of a world, which often sits out of our reach for a lack of access.
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