Opinion: The Bibas Family and a Heartbreaking Reminder

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

In the distant past, before the wonders of modernity changed the workload of the common man, days of quiet drudgery enabled enduring memories.

The pre-industrial era farmer, serf or craftsman worked from dawn ‘til dusk his entire life, working shovel or plow, scythe or hammer. Without radio or PA system to keep him distracted, he had twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours a day to stew on things, decades to contemplate his history, his family’s history, his people’s history.

Little wonder that grudges turned into blood feuds. Little wonder that rivalries between ethnic groups lasted for centuries.

We in the West are busy today, with everything from our schools to our professions, from the internet to the pop culture, to push yesterday’s news out of sight and out of mind. We don’t remember what happened last month, let alone last year.

But in some areas outside the West, where local chieftans and “clerics” believe their power structure would benefit from certain memories, such distractions are not allowed. The jihadist strain of modern islam (not as much of an oxymoron as one might expect) reinforces the race memory of imagined slights from generations ago, the fabricated history of a “palestinian people,” and a warped belief that the most innocent of strangers are in fact “guilty” of a capital crime simply for being of a different religion, a different ethnic background, a different spoken language. The jihadist strain – some call them islamists or islamofascists, or radical muslims or muslim extremists – hates even their fellow muslims for being insufficiently hateful, unsatisfactorily devoted to the killing of everyone else on earth in their quest to establish a new caliphate. And they use every modern device, from internet to currency, to spread this poison ideology across the world.

It was this incredible culture clash that unexpectedly took center stage, as the demons of Hamas staged a horrific celebration upon the return of the corpses of four murdered hostages in mid-February.

Families, friends, politicians, and the world press expected a somber delivery of four caskets – elderly peace activist Oded Lifshitz, young mother Shiri Bibas, and her young sons 4-year-old Ariel and 9-month-old Kfir (their ages as they were on October 7, 2023, the day they were brutally taken hostage).

Instead, Hamas staged a horrific display, with its partisans cheering and jeering behind, staking the outrageous claim that an Israeli airstrike had killed them all, and marking the words “Date of Arrest – 7 October, 2023” on their coffins.

Soon, Israel determined that the body of Shiri Bibas wasn’t even among them; Hamas had substituted some unknown cadaver instead, one with no DNA match in Israeli records. (at this writing, it is believed that Hamas has finally returned the correct remains, without apology).

But as if the fact of the kidnapping and deaths weren’t enough, we learned more in the days following the turnover.

We learned that in order to concoct their claim that an Israeli airstrike had killed these victims, the monsters of Hamas beat them to death – yes, an imprisoned young mother and her two toddlers – with their bare hands, bludgeoning them until their bodies could only be recognized by DNA testing.

What kind of person could do such a thing?

But then, what kind of person could do any of this?

When, in 2005, Israel turned over Gaza to the people we now think of as Gazans – those who call themselves “Palestinians” – Israel delivered a land rich in promise, with thousands of houses, with schools and utilities, with the infrastructure of a modern land. Did Hamas appreciate it? Hardly. They destroyed it all – from greenhouses to water works – as quickly as they could. Hamas didn’t want “Jewish buildings.”

Hamas chose – from the start – to keep their people impoverished, miserable, virtually abandoned. Why? Perhaps because it is only in such awful conditions that people will stew on old complaints for years, growing angrier and angrier through the generations. And Hamas wanted its people angry.

We aren’t like that. Here in the West, we cannot imagine it. Irish Americans whose ancestors were enslaved and starved by the English two or three hundred years ago don’t obsess over it; the villains of the story are long dead, what would be the point?

But the poor – the intentionally poor – people of Gaza do remember, every single lesson they learned at their madrassah, no matter whether it was fiction or nonfiction.

Many of us in the West had already forgotten the horror we witnessed on October 7, 2023. We certainly didn’t get over it, but we tried to get past it. We moved on with our lives, perhaps too much, as this most heartbreaking of “breaking news” gradually turned instead into “old news.”

But now with the fresh horror of the vicious murders of the Bibas children – amidst a backdrop of Hamas’ vile attempt to blame the Israeli government for these innocent children’s torture and death – we are reminded of the myriad nightmares of that awful day.

On October 7, 2023 – seventeen months ago now – a horde of terrorists poured into Israel from Gaza. They descended upon quiet families at home in their kibbutzes and farms. They attacked a music festival. They slaughtered hundreds upon hundreds of innocent civilians – with every weapon from knife to gun, from fist to truck. They forced defenseless parents to watch their daughters be raped, beaten and kidnapped, and to hear the screams of their infant children being incinerated in kitchen ovens before being killed themselves. And they paraded their kidnap victims around Gaza, to the dances and cheers of the Gazan public.

Many of the victims – like the late peace activist Oded Lifshitz – had dedicated their lives to charity work for the so-called palestinians. They were located right along the wall with Gaza specifically because of their dedication to the idea that Jews and Arabs should get along – an idea in which this particular group of Arabs at least has no interest at all.

The Gazans have a chant: From the River to the sea, all Palestine shall be free.” Left unsaid, because they all know what they mean, is that the chant calls for genocide. The chant is calling for all Israel to be free of Jews.

Hamas has a charter: it calls for the nation of Israel to be fully taken over, and its Jewish population driven into the sea.

Do they mean it, one asks, afraid of the answer?

Well, it’s in their charter.

There are peaceful Arab nations, at least for now. These will not accept the people of Gaza. Of all people, these other Arab nations know who they are.

We in the West desperately want to avoid racism. We are terrified of bigotry and we don’t want to practice it ourselves. So we are torn, when confronted with the behavior of both Hamas itself and the local population that heartily, bloodthirstily supports them.

But it’s not bigotry – it’s not racist – to acknowledge reality.

Hamas (along with its predecessors such as the PLO) has spent generations sowing the seeds of hatred in their population. It is today a culture of evil, and it is difficult to imagine any place on earth that wouldn’t be rightly afraid of this particular population.

We in the West have short memories; learning the terrible fate of the Bibas children brought those dormant memories back to the top again.

We are newly reawakened, and we support Israel completely, because it is right and just, and because we can do nothing else. It’s rare in foreign policy that one side is so completely in the right, and the other side is so completely in the service of evil, but this is such a case.

As awful as these spectacles were, they were not completely in vain, for they lifted the veil off the eyes of the West, and reminded us again just what kind of an enemy our friends in Israel must face.

One world relishes in remembering every past injury, real or imagined. The other world forgets every lesson as quickly as it can, and moves on to the next day.

May Divine Providence soften the hearts of the enemy, and help them get over this race-hatred that has been drummed into them all since infancy.

And may Divine Providence help the side of right to keep its righteous recent memory fresh, long enough to remember what’s at stake, to remember the nature of the enemy, and to always defend the people of Israel, and bring justice to that troubled land.

Copyright 2025 John F Di Leo