Sickened, Yes. But Shocked?

By Abe Greenwald

Friday, February 21, 2025

 

Hamas began this war slaughtering Jewish babies on October 7, 2023. At Nir Oz, for example, the entire Siman Yov family was found burned: two-year-old Omer Kedem, five-year-old twin girls Shahr and Arbel, and their parents. In Be’eri, Hamas shot and killed nine-month-old Mila Cohen and her father inside their shelter. Those are scenes from two homes. Many more Israeli children were killed that day. 

 

So why are people shocked, 16 months later, to find that Hamas killed the Bibas babies?

 

First, because murdering babies should be shocking in any context. Second, because some had held out hope this whole time that the Bibas children were alive. But people are also shocked because the world refused to reckon with the extent of Hamas’s depravity from the start. 

 

Ok, why is that? On a practical level, because Islamists and other anti-Semitic extremists peddle lies to anti-Israel liberals who need to believe that Israel’s enemies are after something more noble and sensible than the spilling of Jewish blood. This satisfies their bias against the Jewish state and makes the world a more understandable and comforting place. 

 

Some of those liberals are employed in media, government, and international nonprofit organizations, and they worked to make the slaughtering of babies on October 7 a contested issue. They didn’t entirely succeed, but they managed to distract attention away from Hamas’s infanticides and child-killings by raising doubts about various details. And when anti-Israel journalists had nothing else to use, the phrase “Israeli authorities claim” got the job done. Because on the left, the specter of the Jewish lie outshines the reality of the terrorist atrocity.

 

On social media, of course, the defense of Hamas has been more straightforward. Go to X at any hour and you’ll find someone with thousands of followers who just posted that the IDF itself is responsible for October 7. Those who aren’t conspiracy theorists or outright Jew-haters adopt what they believe is a more reasonable-sounding elision, something to the effect of “Hamas’s attack was bad enough. We don’t have to exaggerate it with tales of baby murder.”

 

That brings us to the larger reason that so many have resisted the truth of Hamas’s degeneracy. There’s a line from Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing that I return to almost daily: “The wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror that men will not speak against it. That men have just enough stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose.” Hamas had the timorous world of “global opinion” beat from the start. 

 

What’s more interesting about McCarthy’s line is that, like so many other axioms, it applies to almost everyone—except the Jews. In fact, for Jews, the inverse applies. While men don’t have “enough stomach” to oppose Hamas’s murdering children, in the second century B.C.E., men invented the Jewish blood libel for the very purpose of opposing the Jews. And it’s never stopped. It’s why the Gaza Ministry of Health exists—to amplify the blood libel and perpetuate Jew-hatred. So Jews are falsely accused of killing gentile babies and anti-Semites are falsely cleared of killing Jewish babies. 

 

Given the millennia of persistent and murderous anti-Semitism, it should be hard to shock the Jews. Given the facts of October 7, it should be impossible for Hamas to do so. And I confess that, while infanticide should always be shocking, I wasn’t shocked by the killing of Ariel and Kfir Bibas. Disgusted and enraged, but not shocked. What shocks me is that Hamas and its supporters in Gaza are still alive. And it shocks me because, for Jews, the other implication of McCarthy’s formula should also be inverted. Unlike other men, Jews must oppose those evils of “sufficient horror.” I am more certain than ever that we will.