Edan Alexander. Omer Neutra. Hersh Goldberg-Polin. Sagui Dekel-Chen. Keith Siegel.
These are the five Americans still held hostage in Gaza by Hamas terrorists. Hamas also killed at least 32 Americans.
The question is, why isn’t President Joe Biden saying their names in public every day? Why is he demanding a ceasefire from Israel, rather than demanding that Hamas release our own people? The ceasefire — indeed, the surrender — must come from the Hamas butchers and torturers who started the awful conflict with Israel. Otherwise, Biden’s message should be simple: All people who hold innocent Americans hostage will die. The United States will track them down; the United States will show no mercy; the United States, with justice on its side, will obliterate the hostage-takers.
The battle should not be between just Israel and Hamas. This is a battle between Hamas and the entire civilized world. The U.S., as the leader of the civilized world and as an aggrieved victim of Hamas’ terrorism, should be using U.S. technology and U.S. weapons to wipe Hamas from the face of the Earth.
Today is a good day to set the moral parameters aright. On Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu profusely apologized for the deaths of seven humanitarian aid workers killed by an Israeli strike. Netanyahu called it “a tragic case of our forces unintentionally hitting innocent people in the Gaza Strip.” Note the rapid self-ownership of error. Note the immediate acknowledgment that the workers were innocent. Note how Netanyahu’s language and context are rooted in civilized standards.
Has Hamas, even once, apologized for killing some 1,200 innocent Israelis and international visitors to Israel? Has Hamas apologized for raping, torturing, and fiendishly butchering many of them, including women and children? Has Hamas apologized for taking and holding innocent hostages in the first place?
Of course not. Hamas is not part of the civilized world. Hamas is an anachronistic remnant of antediluvian barbarism, almost but not quite pre-human. If Hamas would merely join the civilized world, release the hostages, and renounce violence and terrorism, it could stop Palestinians from being killed. Right now.
Instead, the seven aid workers were killed because of the fighting that Hamas invited and that Hamas’s own actions necessitate.
As it is, Israel is striving mightily to spare civilians, even though it is Hamas that puts most civilians at risk by using them as human shields and by putting its headquarters and tunnels under hospitals. Yet Israel somehow has avoided an unusually high ratio of civilian deaths to combatant deaths. The United Nations itself says that in most wars, 90% of deaths are civilians, although other learned sources place the usual ratio closer to 50-50. Either way, Israel has by most accounts stayed below a 60-40 ratio of civilians to combatants, which under the circumstances is not bad at all.
To repeat: These civilian deaths are the fault of Hamas. Hamas can stop them immediately by releasing all its hostages, including the five Americans.
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Again, those five Americans are Edan Alexander, Omer Neutra, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Sagui Dekel-Chen, and Keith Siegel. Say their names. They are innocents being held by brutes. The U.S. government must destroy the brutes. Our message, in the spirit of former President Theodore Roosevelt, must be “Hostages alive, or Hamas captors dead.”
Edan Alexander. Omer Neutra. Hersh Goldberg-Polin. Sagui Dekel-Chen. Keith Siegel.