The ‘Ivanhorod Einsatzgruppen’ photograph, taken during the Second World War in 1942 near Ivanhorod, a village in German-occupied Ukraine, remains a powerful symbol of the cruelty of the Nazi regime. In the image, a soldier points his rifle at a woman who is shielding a child, highlighting the brutal treatment of those deemed sub-human by the Nazis.
Fast forward seven decades, and echoes of this heartlessness reverberate in the recent images of Shiri Bibas desperately protecting her two children, Kfir and Ariel, from Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023. Held captive by militants who viewed them merely as targets, a mother and her young children faced a terrifying ordeal.
The return of Shiri Bibas and her children was marked by a disturbing scene as they were brought back amidst an armed and taunting crowd. This time, the onlookers included not only masked militants but also ordinary Gazans, with children laughing and posing for cameras, while parents watched proudly, creating a surreal and unsettling spectacle.
Dead, their baby bodies brutally mutilated, in coffins draped with Hamas propaganda, Kfir and Ariel were handed over. An added cruelty, a final humiliation: the body in Shiri’s coffin was not her own.
This little family were treated as the ultimate Untermensch – stripped of all dignity, two innocents separated from their mother in death as they must have been in the final anguished moments of their short lives. Hamas couldn’t even grant the Bibas family that crumb of respect: even after all that had been done to them – including forcing their father to declare himself grateful at the prospect of seeing his family again, even though they had already murdered them – they still had to mock them, play the cruellest of tricks.
Such unfathomable disregard for human life is hard to comprehend – unless you see it in the context of anti-Semitism, in which case it makes grim, familiar, sense. It represents a level of loathing that goes far beyond any simple territorial dispute, a deep, centuries-old hatred that the world clearly witnessed in the slaughter, rape and torture of Israeli citizens on October 7 by members of the Hamas terrorist group.
These are not the actions of a people who are simply fighting to protect their territory or borders, in the manner of Ukraine vs Russia. There is a wicked ideology at work here, the same that drives pro-Palestinian supporters to deface posters of Israeli hostages, or compels two Australian nurses to boast that they would kill any ‘Israeli dog’ in their care.
It’s a tribal and visceral hatred, one that cannot be reasoned with – and, as we have seen from the actions of Hamas and their many supporters – knows no bounds. Israel understands this, even if the rest of the world does not. She knows that there is no solution to this conflict other than the ‘final solution’ as far as Hamas is concerned. They will not relent until the Jewish homeland has been wiped off the face of the earth, ‘from the river to the sea’.
That is what Hamas’s treatment of the hostages and their remains betrays. And it is such a sickening display that even those who might be considered sympathetic to their cause have recoiled in horror.
On Thursday, after the bodies were released, Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti Abdul Aziz Al-Sheikh declared their actions ‘a disgrace to Islam, an act of blasphemy against Allah, and a sin that does not represent the followers of the Prophet, peace be upon him, or the honourable religion of Islam’. He added: ‘The path of Islam includes respect even for non-Muslim dead. Today, the Hamas movement has stepped outside the definition of Islam.’ Such brave and honest words from one so senior in the Arab world are deeply welcome.
It’s a stark contrast to the morally vacuous attitude of many in the West, who, despite all evidence to the contrary seem fixated on the notion of Hamas and their supporters as heroic victims of Israeli oppression rather than the ruthless, ideologically driven terrorists they are. Not just the hate-filled marchers, high on pro-Palestinian propaganda; but our own dear, supposedly ‘impartial’ BBC, which last week was shockingly unmasked as a leading proponent of that propaganda.
Its TV documentary Gaza: How To Survive A War Zone, about the lives of several children living in the conflict zone, was trumpeted as an honest account of life in the Strip. However, by Friday it had been pulled from the BBC’s iPlayer platform after it was revealed that its narrator is the son of a Hamas agriculture minister (and reportedly the grandson of a founding member of the organisation), another protagonist was the daughter of a former captain in the Hamas-run police force – and a third had been photographed posing with Hamas fighters.
Did the BBC inform viewers of this connection? Of course not. It wasn’t until the following day, when a journalist pointed it out – as well as the fact that one of the camera crew had voiced approval of the October 7 atrocities – that it became known. Otherwise, the nation might have swallowed the makers’ version of events as entirely impartial.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with wanting to show the plight of Gazans caught up in Israel’s retaliation for the atrocities of October 7. But, as former BBC1 controller Danny Cohen noted, the documentary failed ‘the most basic of programme standards’ because ‘links to the terrorist group Hamas were not disclosed’. He added that ‘it appears that children have been manipulated by terrorists’ and he questioned whether the BBC paid any member of Hamas as part of the filming process.
Naturally, BBC bosses feign ignorance, claiming they were unaware of the connections.
By way of apology, they said that since transmission, they had ‘become aware of the family connections of the film’s narrator. We’ve promised our audiences the highest standards of transparency, so it is only right that as a result of this new information, we add some more detail to the film before its retransmission. We apologise for the omission of that detail from the original film.’ I’m not sure what’s worse: the implied incompetence of that statement or the wilful failure to recognise the damage such an obviously biased account might inflict on British Jews already fearful for their safety.
It’s because of skilled anti-Israel propaganda – of which this BBC documentary is now a prime example – that the blind hatred of Israel (and Jews everywhere) continues to grow in the West.
That is why it matters when the BBC refuses to refer to Hamas as terrorists or when it calls kidnapped Israeli citizens ‘prisoners’ instead of hostages, or overlooks openly anti-Semitic social media posts by BBC staff – all the while casting Palestinian ‘civilians’ as helpless victims. For a hugely influential public broadcaster with a mandate for impartiality, it is the height of irresponsibility. It also speaks of a culture of institutionalised anti-Semitism that is becoming increasingly hard to deny.
Bottom line: people may still trust the BBC but can it still be relied upon to respect that trust, and uphold the values and standards that once made it the envy of the world? The answer, I fear, is increasingly not.
