We must not fall for the deception of Hamas

Dear Demetrius,
Hamas is a terrorist organization and like any terrorist organization it is interested in carrying out demonstrative actions with a strong media impact, in making propaganda and in weakening the image of the adversary, discrediting it. I would say that in this case it is succeeding greatly. It took six of the 101 kidnapped on October 7 and killed them in front of the cameras between Friday evening and Saturday morning, then publishing the bloody videos in which these young people, who had almost a year of life as hostages behind them and appeared worn out, indeed exhausted, were massacred after having first expressed “their last statements”. All of this is terribly chilling. It is a cruelty that goes beyond the limits of the imaginable. It was not the Israeli prime minister who took the lives of these six young people, but Hamas. And this must be underlined, specified, reiterated, because it seems to me that confusion is triumphing. We are all playing the terrorists’ game, the more they realize that their actions are putting Netanyahu in difficulty and eroding his consensus, creating political instability and tensions in Israel, the more interested they will be in carrying out acts of this type, creating pressure on the prime minister to bend to any conditions. The workers’ strikes and demonstrations that are taking place in Israel benefit Hamas, making this organization strong, effective, even more ruthless. The moment it wants to shake world public opinion again and put Netanyahu under pressure, it will be enough to choose and massacre some other hostages, placing the blame on the Israeli prime minister. That this is Hamas’ strategy is also confirmed by its own statements, which pointed the finger at Israel for the killing of the hostages that it itself killed. And then there is Biden who goes after Hamas and attacks Netanyahu, corroborating the accusations made by the terror militiamen. It is madness. Under pressure from global public opinion, increasingly outraged by the conditions of extreme suffering of the population of Gaza, no one has the courage to tell the truth: the hostages killed by Hamas are victims of Hamas and not of Netanyahu. The latter may have made his mistakes, he may have even exceeded certain limits in his defensive response, but by attacking him we are only making things easier for Hamas, who in the distorted minds of many is even emerging as a martyr, while it is the organization that attacked Israel on October 7, unleashing a war, an inevitable reaction, kidnapping and torturing over 100 people, killing hundreds more, raping and impregnating female hostages and committing all sorts of atrocities. Hamas is also guilty of what the people in Gaza are suffering, including children. Yet we blame the attacked state and its prime minister and not the terrorist aggressor.

The opposite approach, however, is the one we have adopted regarding the war in Ukraine. In the West, no one has victimized the aggressor or has ever dreamed of blaming Zelensky for the suffering endured by the Ukrainians, no one has proclaimed that Zelensky should surrender for the good of his people and accept Putin’s conditions to avoid further victims. On the contrary, those who insinuate it are blacklisted, criminalized, suspected of being pro-Putin, accused of making propaganda on behalf of the Russian president.

These two positions, the one we have towards

Hamas/Netanyahu and the one we have towards Putin/Zelensky are absolutely irreconcilable, antithetical, contradictory.

It is the fruit of our hypocrisy. Or perhaps – which is even worse – of our stupidity.