The Murder of the Bibas Family

The Palestinian cause is fundamentally broken

Second Nazi: Have you noticed that our caps actually have little pictures of skulls on them?

Hans: I don't... er-

Second Nazi: Hans... are we the baddies?

I wonder what must have been going through the minds of the armed, masked Hamas jihadists tasked with standing over the coffins of the two Bibas infants and their murdered mother the other day.

Somebody within Hamas evidently made the executive call to build an entire stage set around the tiny coffins so that throngs of Palestinian civilians could turn out to cheer the lurid spectacle of murdered Jewish babies.

Hamas decided to frame this horror against the backdrop of cheerful, upbeat music and a full sized poster of the happy, smiling family - pictured in earlier times prior to their kidnap and execution by Hamas.

Just imagine, for a second, the logistics involved in producing this nightmarish carnival of death in a society torn apart by almost two years of total war.

Somebody in Gaza had to design the stage and plan its construction.

Somebody had to produce the coffins and the tiny identifying photographs attached to them under the grotesque inscription: ‘‘Arrested on October 7.’’

Somebody had to design and print the full sized poster of the murdered family and transport it to the site.

Somebody else had to acquire speakers to blast the cheerful, upbeat music meant to mark the day as one of celebration and joy.

Still others had to organise the rows of masked, armed Hamas militants to ensure they appeared presentable in full battle regalia after fighting for almost two years without uniforms or insignia.

Just how many people in Gaza voluntarily made themselves part of this lurid necro-carnival of death?

And just how many stopped to ponder what it was exactly they were doing?

Did anybody stop to think: ‘‘Hmmm, perhaps this is not a good look for the Palestinian cause?’’

Did the masked and armed militants or the set designers or the men responsible for hooking the music up to the loudspeakers ever stop to think: ‘Hans … Are we the baddies?’’

It is hard to understand what exactly Hamas hoped to achieve by deciding to present themselves and the Palestinian cause to the world in the most maximally evil fashion possible.

Was there not a single person within Hamas capable of vetoing this plan?

Not a single person capable of speaking to the footsoldiers and telling them: ‘‘Look, love the ambition and energy guys, but let’s scale back this whole baby murder carnival business?’’

Apparently not.

Which takes me to my next point: the central problem that runs all the way to the core of the Palestinian cause.

And this problem, basically, is a failure to construct a sound theory of mind to understand and predict how other people will behave.

Did Hamas really think that this spectacle would demoralise Israeli Jews, making them less committed to defending themselves against genocidal Arab anti-Semitism?

Did Hamas really think that this murderous burleseque show would strike a final blow against Zionism, causing all Israeli Jews to collectively decide to give up and walk hand in hand into the Mediterranean in a vast act of collective national suicide?

This is truly the retarded ideological mindset behind Hamas’s actions and Nasrallah’s infamous ‘‘spiderweb’’ theory - the notion that with enough killing and bloodshed the Yahud can simply be terrorised into fleeing their homes.

This is the ultimate catastrophic misunderstanding, the ultimate catastrophic error that has bedevilled Arab politics for more than a century now: the belief that Jews are simply weak and decadent foreign interlopers who will flee Israel en masse if subjected to enough terror and violence.

This is why Islamists devoted so much time to celebrating purported images showing Israelis fleeing airports on October 7.

They thought Israeli Jews would simply call Zionism a day, pack everything up and fly to Brooklyn. They thought Netanyahu would respond to images of flaming overrun kibbutzim on October 7 by signing papers dissolving the State of Israel.

This of course did not happen, because we live in the real world.

Israeli Jews responded to the atrocities of October 7 with an overwhelming desire for vengeance and mass retaliation precisely because they did not intend on committing suicide by subjecting their necks before the blades of their would-be executioners.

So the Hamas-Hezbollah thesis that terrorism and mass murder will drive the Jews from Israel comprehensively failed once again - as it has over and over again for more than a century now.

It failed at Jaffa, it failed at Hebron, it failed at Kfar Etzion, it failed at Munich.

It failed when Palestinian militants launched hundreds of suicide bombings and bus bombings and restaurant bombings during the 2000s.

And it comprehensively failed on October 7.

We have seen more than a century of massacres and pogroms against Jews in the Middle East now - massacres which have achieved precisely nothing for the Palestinian cause.

Yet still they persist with this insane strategy.

Even after the immense horror of the past sixteen months, Palestinian militants still believe there can be a final solution to the “Zionist problem’’ through violence and concerted military action.

Why else would Hamas try synchronise this latest outrage against humanity with a massive terrorist bomb plot designed to murder hundreds of civilians in Israel with bombs on board buses and bombs hidden at a children’s water park?

Hamas appears to have used the tiny amount of cognition available to them to work out that the second Israel received the bodies of the Bibas twins and saw what Hamas did to them, their entire operation was over.

So they figured the only path forward was to double down on the exact same delusional war strategy that has characterised Arab anti-Zionism for the past eighty years: waging endless apocalyptic jihad against the Jews.

The only reason hundreds were not slaughtered was because Hamas timed the bombs incorrectly so that three of the bus bombs exploded not during peak hour traffic as intended but instead while the buses sat empty at their depot.

When does it end?

Have the people of Gaza not suffered enough? Apparently not, according to Hamas - they demand the resumption of total war, even though it is a war they and their people are plainly losing.

Again, nobody forces Hamas to make these catastrophic decisions based on complete and total delusion.

Nobody forced Hamas to kidnap a Jewish mother and her two infant children on October 7 before executing them all in captivity and mutilating their bodies.

Nobody forced Hamas to demand living convicted terrorists be handed over in return for the corpses of the children they murdered.

Nobody forced Hamas to stage a grotesque, demented victory parade with the coffins.

Nobody forced Hamas to rub salt into the wound by returning a random anonymous corpse in place of the mother’s body.

Nobody forced them to make all these catastrophic decisions - decisions maximally designed to induce hatred and make peace impossible.

No, it appears to be the case that when they make these utterly catastrophic, retarded decisions, they make them all on their own.

Nobody forces them to continually attempt to sacrifice the entire people of Gaza on the bloody altar of genocidal Jew hatred. Yet this is what Hamas desperately desire.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said this himself on television after October 7: "The blood of the women, children and elderly … we are the ones who need this blood, so it awakens within us the revolutionary spirit, so it awakens with us resolve.’’

Drunk on terror and bloodshed, Hamas intends now to go down with the ship.

And true to their past form as suicide bombers, they have shackled the Palestinian people and the Palestinian cause to the wheelhouse, demanding they go down with them.

When does it end?

God help us all.