The Hamas Torture Videos

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, November 12, 2024

 

It’s difficult to shock an Israeli military interrogator, but Yahya Sinwar did it. A former investigator with the Shin Bet security service was once asked what stuck in his memory from decades-ago interrogations of the late Hamas leader, and he replied that it was Sinwar’s admission that he forced a Palestinian man to bury his own brother alive. Sinwar had been worried that the man was “collaborating” with Israel.

 

“His eyes were full of happiness when he told us this story,” the Israeli, Michael Koubi, told the Associated Press.

 

Sinwar’s nickname was, after all, the Butcher of Khan Younis. Which meant he was butchering Palestinians.

 

Koubi’s story came to mind this week when the IDF released hours of footage of Hamas officials torturing Palestinian civilians. The footage was recovered in Gaza, and received much more press this week outside of the United States than here at home. Journalists and activists have wondered why that is.

 

Koubi’s conversation with Sinwar all those years ago provides one answer: We all already knew this about Hamas. But the American media (and to some extent Western media more broadly) and the progressive activist class have chosen a side in the war between Israel and Hamas—and they did so with eyes wide open. Film of Hamas torturing gay men won’t change the mind of anyone who was camping out at a tentifada or marching down city streets chanting “From the river to the sea.”

 

The press has, therefore, been hesitant to remind the world that so many among them have gleefully aligned themselves with the planet’s most evil human beings.

 

The videos hold important historical value as proof of what we cannot pretend we didn’t know. The Daily Mail describes some of their contents. A few examples:

 

“The harrowing videos show male prisoners with sacks over their heads, chained to floors and ceilings in painful positions.”

 

“Men writhe in agony as they are beaten with sticks on the soles of their feet.”

 

“One interrogator reclines on a chair, with his arms folded behind his head, in front of a chained-up prisoner hanging from the ceiling by his arms.”

 

“Another film features a man, with a red sack over his head, chained up so awkwardly he can just about place one foot on the floor. One captor later appears to brutally choke the man.”

 

One Gazan (it’s not clear if he’s in any of the videos) told the paper that he was kidnapped and tortured by Hamas thugs every few years since they found out he was gay.

 

Next to gay Palestinians, Hamas’s favorite torture targets appear to be those deemed suspected “collaborators.” One Israeli intelligence officer spoke of people who were “electrocuted on electricity pylons or dragged on a chain from a vehicle until they die.” Some victims had plastic melted onto their body.

 

It wasn’t only gays and those with Jewish contacts who were abducted and tormented by Hamas; so were suspected adulterers. Perhaps one of the American activists in a Handmaid’s Tale costume could spare a tear for the victims of the actual dystopian government from hell. But that would be the same torture force for which many of them and their comrades are also advocating, unfortunately.

 

That’s the story here; that’s the why. We’re not hearing much about the videos of Hamasniks carrying out what one Gaza-born activist described as “a fundamental component of Hamas’ governance strategy” because it is a fundamental component of Hamas’s governance strategy. To acknowledge this is to acknowledge that nobody cares less about Palestinians than legions of so-called “pro-Palestinian activists” in the West. It is to acknowledge that many Americans are attracted not to the justness of a cause but to its display of homicidal indifference to life.

 

Similarly, these are not skeletons in Sinwar’s closet. They are the very foundation of his life and career. They are the reason for his every promotion, for his selection, ultimately, to be the representation of Hamas to the world as well as to Palestinians in Gaza. To discuss these videos is to confront the fact that we in the West have a serious problem on our hands and no strategy to reclaim the principles of liberal democracy before Generation Sinwar buries those principles alive.