Let’s hope the delusional demonstrators sympathizing with Hamas — in the United States and elsewhere — caught the translation of a recent interview with a senior member of the terror group. His chilling comments deserve far more attention than they’ve received.
“Israel is a country that has no place on our land,” Ghazi Hamad said last month in an interview with Lebanese TV. “We must remove it because it constitutes a security, military and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation. We are not ashamed to say this.”
When asked whether this meant the annihilation of Israel, Hamad, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, responded unequivocally, “Yes, of course.”
Hamad went on to foreshadow multiple repeats of the Oct. 7 atrocity against Israel, saying there would be “a second, a third, a fourth” terror attack. “Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”
It is against this horrific backdrop that congressional Democrats now increasingly call for Israel to unilaterally lay down its arms and observe a cease-fire.
Last week, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., became the latest member of his party to scold the Jewish state for what can be described only as an act of self-preservation in the face of unimaginable barbarism.
Sen. Durbin and his fellow travelers blithely ignore that a “cease-fire” is a victory for Hamas, allowing it to regroup and rearm in service to the very terror attacks that Hamad telegraphed are coming on innocent Israelis.
Would it be impolite to note that they are parroting Israel’s enemies? The Iranian backed terror group Hezbollah also called for a “cease-fire” last week while simultaneously reiterating its support for Hamas and threatening Israel with an escalation of hostilities on its northern border with Lebanon.
The Biden administration is pushing Israel to allow for “humanitarian pauses,” The New York Times reported, to allow the distribution of aid. It must ultimately be up to the Israeli government to determine whether such a request can be fulfilled without compromising the country’s ability to ferret out Hamas terrorists and destroying the group’s infrastructure of death.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday called it “striking” and “shocking” that the brutality of the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel has already “receded so quickly in the memories of so many.” Indeed. Blinken appeared “shaken,” CNN noted, as he related seeing more gruesome video of the Hamas invasion.
“I saw, for example, a family on a kibbutz, a father (of) two young boys — maybe 10, 11 years old — grabbing them, pulling them out of their living room, going through their very small backyard and into a shelter, followed seconds later by a terrorist who throws a grenade into that small shelter,” Blinken said. “And then as the father comes staggering out, shoots him down. And then the boys come out, and they run into their house, and the camera in the house is filming everything. And they’re crying. ‘Where’s daddy?’ one says. The other says, ‘They killed daddy. Where’s my mommy?’ And then the terrorists come in, and casually open the refrigerator and start to eat from it.”
To excuse or minimize such depravity is indefensible.
Hamas has the means to de-escalate hostilities.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Friday that there would be no cease-fire until Hamas releases the more than 200 hostages — innocent civilians — it seized during the Oct. 7 raid.
That would seem to be a smart course of action if Hamas is truly worried about lost life. But for this “nation of martyrs” clearly willing to sacrifice its own innocents in pursuit of killing Jews, the smart course of action is rarely the one taken.