Where Are All Those Bleeding Hearts?

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets yesterday to protest following the horrific murder of six hostages held by Hamas terrorists, whom the spineless BBC continues to refer to as “fighters”.

While the protest was primarily aimed at Netanyahu’s government and its apparent unwillingness to reach a hostage deal with Hamas, one cannot but help wonder: Where are all those bleeding hearts that constantly speak out against Israel, but have nothing to say about Hamas barbarism? Where were they yesterday in London, Paris and New York?

When one Palestinian child is infected by the polio virus, the entire world, aided by Israel, calls for a humanitarian corridor to vaccinate every Palestinian child. Where is that same world when six helpless Israeli hostages, who had been starved, tormented and held prisoner for eleven months in dark underground tunnels, are mercilessly shot in the head by Hamas monsters. (“Animals” is too kind a term to describe them. Animals don’t behave that way.)

At least the UK Daily Telegraph had the courage to speak out and ask: “Where are the mass protests against the inhumanity of Hamas?”

We can rely on the CNN, the British-Iranian journalist Christiane Amanpour and the BBC to tell the Palestinian narrative, mouthing every day the Palestinian death toll as put out by Gaza’s Hamas-controlled health ministry as though it were “Gospel truth”. They constantly show us pictures of helpless Gazans living in tents, but what do they have to say about the 120,000 Israelis who have been displaced from their homes?

They show us poor Palestinian women with their children sitting on the ground next to puddles of water, while at the same time interviewing the head of the Hamas Health Ministry in his plush office with a beautiful arrangement of orchids in the background. (I wish my orchids looked that good!) Do the media have nothing to say about the incongruity between his creature comforts and that of many of his people?

The new school year has just started. What will happen to all of those Israeli children, who have fled their homes and no longer have schools to go to? And what of all those Israeli families whose houses have been destroyed, have lost their jobs or businesses, cannot attend to their crops and have nothing to return to?

I saw a graffiti in Tel Aviv today. “The Red Cross was not there for the Jews in 1939”. That same Red Cross demands access to Palestinian prisoners being held by Israel and who receive three meals a day (and not at most just one pitta and an olive), but has not been granted access to the Israeli hostages held by Hamas, or been allowed to give them the medicines that Israel has tried to transfer to them. Where is the Red Cross? Where is the international outrage and condemnation of that?

What do those around the world, who hold placards proclaiming “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free”, have to say about that, or don’t they care?

And where are all those gullible American college students, who threaten Jews on campus and have swallowed the Palestinian narrative hook, line and sinker? They need to be told that Palestinians do not have a monopoly on suffering, and if thousands of Palestinians had not broken into Israel on October 7th burning, murdering, raping, and carrying off live, wounded and dead hostages, we would not all be facing a humanitarian crisis that is not only tragic for many innocent Palestinian families but also for large numbers of Israelis.

I don’t expect any better of Hamas, and perhaps, as the child of a Holocaust survivor, I should have learned not to be that surprised if much of the world does not care about us either.