At first it was only a few people who reluctantly referred to the Hamas murderers as animals. After that, a more popular reference to these terrorists was savages, and more recently the word “monsters” was introduced when the media pundits were forced to comment on the actions of these so-called people who murder small children with their bare hands.
President Trump says it as do many other U.S. officials. Of late, Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu has taken to calling them just plain monsters and there is no better way to express what Israel is dealing with.
The aforementioned words that describe the Arab miscreants are certainly right on target. I prefer to call them miscreants, but its meaning is not easily understood or broken down for all to absorb or understand. A miscreant is a person like Hamas and the Palestinian Arabs who behaves badly and illegally; wrongdoers and villains. Hamas and the Palestinian Arabs who support them and sympathize with them are all of those things.
But as we bandy about with these descriptions of the terrorists, we are also stuck in this name-calling phase of this long and dragged-out process.
It is indeed impossible to place yourself in the mindset of the type of terrorist that we are dealing with, though it should be added that there is no good terrorist and no satisfactory or productive terrorism.
There is no objection from here about calling them monsters, animals, or savages. Although the other day on Fox News, the Trump administration’s Envoy for Hostages, Adam Boehler, said that referring to the terrorists in Gaza as animals is an insult to animals. That’s an on-target and poignant description of what is going on there. Yes, Israel has fought back gallantly and with great courage. Had Israel not fought the way they did, there would not have been the negotiated process that currently exists.
The leaders of the Israeli government are level-headed. They don’t just see or understand the so-called big picture. They have assigned great importance to every hostage’s life and are releasing hundreds—and what will ultimately be—thousands of dangerous Palestinian Arab convcts serving sentences in Israeli jails. The reality is that this is the best of the worst kind of agreements that Israel could have entered into.
Knesset Members like Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, as well as others have been insisting that the government apply more pressure to get the terrorists to hand over the living and dead hostages. That would mean a halt to humanitarian aid being shipped by hundreds of trucks into Gaza on a daily basis. Along with that, Israel ships fuel and provides electricity to the Gaza Strip enclave.
And Ben-Gvir and Smotrich made an inordinate amount of sense. Who in their right mind deals with an enemy in this fashion? Hamas returns dead bodies of babies that were brutally murdered by the hands of yes, animals (sorry animals), but the world, and especially the old corrupt Biden group insisted that regardless of the violent deaths dispensed by Hamas, the humanitarian aid must keep flowing into Gaza unabated. Now that grotesque parody is ending.
Then there is the clear use of contradictory statements by politicians and diplomats. And this is true of Israeli leaders as well, not just the mostly silent world leaders who have perfected the ability to once again look the other way when it comes to the torture and murder of Jews.
This past Sunday, Trump’s National Security Director, former Congressman Mike Waltz was on Fox News. In just a few sentences, he said that Hamas has to be obliterated (it’s uncertain what that means) and then he said that in the future, we have to make sure that Hamas can never rule Gaza again.
It seems to me that if Hamas is obliterated, which to many would mean physically destroyed, removed from the planet, or in other words, eliminated, they would ipso facto not be able to rule Gaza.
If you are Hamas, how do you react to this type of treatment when the best the civilized world can do in the face of this type of terror and slaughter is to just call these miscreants names on an alternating basis? This means that sometimes they are animals; other times they are monsters and savages. It seems that this entire process is devolving into a game of name-calling…. Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never harm me.
To that end, Hamas just carries on week after week releasing just a trickle of hostages, and even sending to Israel a different body in place of the murdered mother, Shiri Bibas, rachmana litzlan. And this past Saturday when they released six hostages (two of which were held for more than a decade), they brought along two other Israeli hostages to observe the proceedings and then returned them to captivity.
At least this past Saturday Israel nudged back just a bit when they loaded the hundreds of convicted Hamas terrorists onto buses to be returned to Gaza, Judea, and Samaria, but then because of the brutal way Hamas was conducting these releases, the prisoners were taken off the buses and returned to their prison cells. The Prime Minister then announced that this group would be released as per the agreement after the next release of hostages, provided there are no cheering Palestinian Arab crowds gloating over the gruesome torture and near starvation of the people they kidnapped on 10-7.
On a related matter, President Trump had made it clear that if all the hostages were not released by the time he was sworn into office on January 20th, all hell would break loose.
Yes, there is a phase one of the agreement that has a trickle of innocent, mostly young Israelis being allowed out via the Red Cross in exchange for the release of hundreds of ruthless criminals and murderers from Israel’s prisons.
At the same time, it is true that Biden and Blinken could not achieve anything other than making sure that the markets where the Gazans sold food supplied by Israel to the deceptively starving Palestinian Arabs were well-stocked with all kinds of local delicacies. No one was starving, though Hamas made sure that many of their own people died and were being used as human shields at the start of the war.
The name-calling aspect of this awful and painful situation really has to come to a conclusion. It’s true that Israel over the last 16 months did indeed accomplish much more than calling the terrorists nefarious, malicious, or evil. Israel managed to kill the head of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, while he was in a hotel bathroom in Tehran. They also eliminated a series of other leading terrorists like Mohammed Deif and Hezbollah chief, Hassan Nasrallah, in Lebanon and tens of thousands of terrorists in Gaza and Lebanon, and is now doing the same in Judea and Samaria..
But right now, Israel is bogged down on a rather imbalanced and disjointed arrangement that is undoubtedly designed to resume the war at some point. With Trump in The White House, Israel will have the Biden and Blinken shackles removed and the weapons flowing.
All things considered, the daily name calling has to be considered exhausted and at this point, counterproductive. With Donald Trump in the Oval Office and Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary, Israel will no longer have to be coaxed and directed to fight to a draw. As in, yes, you can win and should win, but don’t win too much.
What Donald Trump and his administration are doing is not just making America great, more than anything he is turning America into the country it used to be and clearly people appreciate that.
Here’s a description of Hamas that hasn’t been used as of yet: sub-human. That’s an on-target description. At least, it’s as much on-target as the next 2,000-pound bomb headed to Rafah (may it be soon, ed.).
Thousands came out in person and many millions more followed online to mourn the loss of Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas, Hy’d. As the youngest victims of October 7, the babies’ innocent faces and striking carrot-hair, as well as the determination of their loving mother to protect them gripped the hearts of our nation. Many government buildings were lit orange in their memory and an orange broken heart image has gone viral on social media. May Yarden and the rest of the Bibas family be comforted among the mourners of Zion.
Larry Gordon -is the editor-in-chief of 5TJT.com.