All that your performative activism demonstrates is just how incredibly depraved and callous you’ve become, using human suffering, grief, and pain to promote your own selfish interests. You claim to care so deeply about the hostages and their loved ones, and yet instead of joining in collective mourning and promoting unity, your gut reaction is to take to the streets in protest, to create divide and sow division - because everything always has to be about you!
Here’s a question, how often did you rise up to call for Gilad Schalit to be brought home during his 64 months in Hamas captivity? If you didn’t, your hypocrisy is blaring! If you did, well then you share in the consequences of releasing Sinwar and many of those terrorists who perpetrated October 7th and have murdered countless innocent people across this country these last years - that is blood on your hands.
It is telling how many are out demanding the release of hostages, but still don’t know the names Oron Shaul, Hadar Goldin, Avera Mengistu, or Hisham al-Sayed - your advocacy is a complete sham. This is nothing more than act of selfish convenience and opportunity to push your perverse agenda and misguided priorities on an entire nation. You diminish the complexities, considerations, and consequences of a harsh reality into a rallying call of “we need” like a petulant child throwing a tantrum when they don’t get what they want.
The parallels that can be drawn between you and the sheepish herds of global protesters gathering to “peacefully” call for a ceasefire while demonstrating their solidarity with Hamas, is uncanny. At least they have the courage to openly display their support for Hamas’s continued reign of terror (even if behind a mask), while you cower behind the plight of innocent hostages to do the very same.
Please explain why you are screaming “Bring Them Home” instead of screaming “Release Them Now? You foolishly place that burden on the shoulders of the Government of Israel alone. Have you forgotten that it was Hamas that took these people hostage and for eleven months now holds them in subterranean tunnels in the most horrific conditions, exposing them to unimaginable horrors, and using them (along with their own people) as human shields? But somehow the failure of a hostage to be returned is framed as our government’s failure to live up to your expectations, shifting responsibility from those that actually control the fate of these lives to those attempting to balance their survival today with that of an entire nation for years to come.
All the while you profess to care so deeply about human suffering and life, yet utterly ignore the tens-of-thousands actually battling Hamas to free our hostages, putting their lives at risk in the hell-hole known as Gaza, while you stand waving your little signs blocking traffic, rioting against our own brethren in police uniform, and bringing an entire economy to a screeching halt with your labor strike, because all that is clearly going to help while our country is at war and our economy is in shambles.
So do tell me, our people that fell or are irreparably injured from battle, are they just collateral damage in your perverse little world view? The level of contempt you demonstrate for their lives is shocking.
When you and irresponsible IDF figures say we can give up the Philadelphi Corridor because we can always retake it if need be, they seem to think the world would allow that, but even if it did, do they factor in the number of soldiers who would die doing so?
Just what responsibility will you take for the next parent burying their child because of your actions? You appear eager to do everything to save the hostages, but in reality doing little but offering to risk the lives of others to realize your own political aspirations.
The entire “Bring Them Home” movement has become a mouthpiece for the rabid left, those still crying about losing an election to a right wing government two year ago. Those same protests we endured for all those months prior to October 7th, all the same contrived hysteria and misplaced outrage, just now repackaged with a seemingly more sympathetic and palatable purpose.
While this government failed the country miserably on and leading up to October 7th, the fact remains that Iran and its proxies had taken advantage of all the internal turmoil and chaos you ignite as a sign of our weakness and vulnerability - the very same you continue to perpetuate. So maybe ask yourself, just whose interests your actions serve.
You want to bring hostages home, then focus your rage on Hamas and the rest of the world that has all but abandoned them. Demand their release from those who actually hold them and those who have done nothing substantive all these months, all those world leaders, influencers, thought-leaders, and organizations merely paying lip service with hollow rhetoric and pretending they have no power to secure their release without ever trying! Including the Red Cross.
But that’s not what you’ve done or seem to want to do. Instead, you choose to turn the hostages into your own pawns, playing with their plight and manipulating human sympathy to promote your own political agenda. You trample on the memory of all those that have fallen as you conspire with your fellow protesters to subvert the government.
So let me be clear, in case it is not yet apparent. You are not blameless, you bear responsibility for the loss of life, no less than those you falsely target with such outrage. Perhaps it’s best you spend some time reflecting on your own actions and inactions, before pointing fingers? Perhaps choose silence, and sit this one out? Perhaps recognize that injecting your needless “noise” at this time is the last thing any of us need? Or at the very least, just realize this isn’t about “you”, it is about “us”!
Just a thought.
David Friedmanlives in Ein Karem, Jerusalem after making Aliyah from New York and can be reached at IG @madexchance and read at www.madexchance.com