“An innocent child who was lost has now been found and returned,” was how the Irish Prime Minister, Leo Varadkar, greeted the news of nine-year-old Emily Hand being released from her Hamas hellhole. He made it sound like the poor girl had been temporarily separated from her family during a busy shopping day at Brent Cross. This was the child whose father was so tortured by the thought of her being kidnapped by wicked men that he confessed he loved her so much he hoped that she was dead.
“Keep waving,” said the Hamas terrorists, handing over another little girl to the Red Cross on Friday night. As she waved back nervously — they still have seven of her family locked up, so of course she did — the Hamas PR machine must have been punching the air in delight. This is the narrative they are trying to sell you: Hamas are just misunderstood humanitarians — or, at least, principled freedom fighters pushing back against years of colonial oppression. We treat our captives well, they say. Not kidnapped, just lost.
How is it that some people fall for all this manipulative rubbish? There have been posters of these children ripped down all over London and New York by Hamas apologists, gleeful fools who seem to think it’s a lie that children were ever taken in the first place. It’s like watching Holocaust denial develop in real time. Antisemitism doesn’t just rot the soul; it rots the brain.
Admittedly, facing the truth is often impossibly demanding, especially when the truth is as distressing as this is. I thought I was mentally prepared for Bearing Witness, the IDF’s 47-minute compilation of footage taken on October 7, which I saw last week at a private screening. But my body clearly wasn’t. Ten minutes in, I started to shake. The organisers had prepared the audience as best they could and explained there was no shame in having to leave. And there was a point where I was close.
Some of the footage came from Hamas bodycams, some from their mobile phones, some from CCTV, some from first responders. All of it was horrific. Later, after a number of medicinal whiskies, I did manage to sleep. But I woke early. And in the small hours, there was little protection from all those images: the beheadings, the children crying out for “abba” as their father was murdered before their eyes, the sheer joy with which Hamas hunted down and slaughtered their victims, the lifeless bodies of children in their Mickey Mouse pyjamas, the contortions of the dying, the endless pools of blood.
All lies, say Hamas’s useful idiots. Why else, they say, would this IDF production be shown only to a select group of sympathetic (a.k.a. gullible) journalists and opinion-formers. In that case, I’m not sure how obsessive Israel-hater Owen Jones made it onto the IDF guest list. The gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell also sat behind me. He’s no establishment patsy by a long chalk.
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