RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/

Hamas released the cruel images of the starved and skeletal Israeli hostages for two reasons.

The first was to demonstrate the triumph of its diabolical strategy to turn the Holocaust into a weapon to exterminate the nation that was reborn out of its ashes.

Releasing these terrible images of starved Jews, who look like inmates of the Nazi death camps, was designed to throw the Holocaust into the Jews’ faces by saying “Look, here it is again but now the world doesn’t care and is blaming you instead for being the Nazis”. It was a triumphant taunt that Israel was powerless to prevent the second Holocaust that Hamas never stops announcing it is planning.

It’s no accident that these images were released just days after Britain’s prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, announced that the UK would recognise a state of Palestine unless the Israelis ceased fire in Gaza.

Along with French president Emanuel Macron and Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney, who have also declared they will recognise “Palestine”, Starmer thus put rocket fuel behind the lie that Israel is starving the people of Gaza to death and that Israel, not Hamas, is to blame for Gaza’s plight.

This lie has been assiduously spread throughout the west by Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Palestinian Authority, which has been promoting for decades the monstrous claim that the Israelis are Nazis bent on genocide — a stupendous inversion aimed to conceal the PA’s own Nazi roots.

Hamas hit pay dirt with their release of pictures of emaciated children who they said were being starved to death by Israel in Gaza. The media, led by Hamas’s prized agents in the west the BBC, New York Times and Guardian, duly gave these images front page and uncritical treatment — even though the children in these pictures were actually suffering from dreadful congenital diseases or some pictures had been taken in Yemen.

As a result, with the connivance of the UN working hand-in-hand with Hamas to produce twisted claims of famine, and with the media publishing yet more false allegations that the Israel Defence Forces were deliberately killing Gazans in the aid queues, much of the west — including President Trump and Vice-President JD Vance — fell for the lie.

So the images of the Israeli hostages who are are actually being starved in Hamas tunnels have met little more than a shrug, while western governments and the humanitarian establishment work out ways to punish Israel for the crimes that Hamas is actually committing.

It is the Israeli hostages who are being starved while Israel is allowing huge amounts of food into Gaza. Yet astoundingly, in the west it’s Hamas that’s gained the moral high ground.

Pictures of the aid trucks that Israel has allowed into Gaza but whose cargos are rotting because the UN refuses to distribute it are ignored. Videos of Hamas operatives beating and shooting Gazans for receiving food aid are ignored, as are contrasting videos showing Gazans in orderly queues at the Israel-US run GHF food points and who are smiling and cheering the Americans and Israelis for getting food to them safely for the first time.

Terrifyingly, people are now utterly impervious to evidence and facts. The Starmer government promotes falsehood after distortion after falsehood. Foreign Secretary David Lammy claimed Israel was allowing into Gaza only a “drip-feed” of food. Starmer professes to be horrified by a “catastrophic failure of aid; we see starving babies, children too weak to stand: images that will stay with us for a lifetime”.

It’s the images of the starved hostages that will stay with the rest of us for a lifetime but on which Starmer has so far said absolutely nothing. Instead, while mouthing bromides about the plight of the hostages and never allowing Hamas to regain power, he is treating Israel not Hamas as the offender, placing conditions on Israel and threatening it while placing no conditions on Hamas. As a result, he gave Hamas every incentive to end negotiations for the hostages’ release.

As senior Hamas official Razi Hamad has exulted:

The initiative of several countries to recognise a Palestinian state is one of the fruits of October 7. We have proven that victory over Israel is not impossible, and our weapon is a symbol of Palestinian honour.

Take a bow, Starmer, Macron and Carney, for empowering the Hamas genocide cult.

Recognising “Palestine” is in itself ludicrous since this alleged state has no shape, no borders, no government; it is a phantom, and it cannot be willed into existence just because countries say they recognise it. And since its sole purpose — according to the Palestinian Arabs themselves — is to be a staging post for the destruction of Israel, Starmer, Macon and Carney have now signed up their countries to that infernal agenda.

In Britain, around 40 members of the House of Lords, including a number of eminent lawyers, wrote to the Attorney-General to warn fruitlessly that recognising “Palestine” would be illegal under international law. In a separate opinion Malcolm Shaw KC, another leading UK lawyer, has said recognising a Palestine state would destabilise the international legal order.

Israel is now caught in a trap. It’s being forced to make a diabolical choice between, on the one hand, being placed once again at the mercy of genocidal fanatics on its doorstep and, on the other, being destroyed by world opprobrium.

Some of Israel’s supporters have accordingly urged Israel to break free of this trap by accepting yet another ceasefire to rescue more hostages.

This is the second reason why Hamas released that hostage video — to break Israeli hearts so badly they will beg their government to surrender.

But the consequence of that would be yet more Israelis butchered, raped, burned alive, kidnapped and starved to death. If Israel leaves Hamas undefeated, Israelis will be unable to return safely to their homes on the Gaza border. Israel therefore has no option but to press on to destroy Hamas as a military and governing force.

If the west really wants to stop the war it would start putting pressure on the aggressor, Hamas, by supporting its victim, Israel, in its demand that Hamas surrenders.

If the west really wants to stop the war it should end its utterly perverse indulgence of Qatar as an honest broker in this conflict, an attitude that has made all ceasefire negotiations a lethal farce that has significantly contributed to the hostages’ continued incarceration and the length of this war. It should instead call out Qatar as a sponsor and protector of Hamas and as a Muslim Brotherhood Islamist front. It should require the issue of arrest warrants for the Hamas leaders living lives of luxury in Doha. And it should demand that Qatar force Hamas to release all the hostages immediately on pain of losing its US airbase and all influence in the west.

If the west really wants to stop the war, it should acknowledge the malignant role of the Hamas-loving, Israel-demonising UN which the US should defund and kick out of New York City as an affront to civilised values.

But of course, the west doesn’t want to stop the war. It wants to stop Israel. And it is now being consumed by Jew-hatred on a scale large than anything seen since the Holocaust.

We are witnessing a confluence of Nazi-Islamist ideology with a Soviet-style inversion of reality that has taken over huge swathes of the west that are no longer able to think at all. The total repudiation of reason that’s created this terrifying, looking-glass world has resulted from decades of cultural attrition waged by elites determined to destroy western identity and values.

With the unspeakable rebranding of atrocities as conscience in the west, we are living through a war of moral inversion being waged not through bombs or missiles but through the minds of millions.

When pictures of the Belsen death camp were published after the end of the Second World War, people in the west were deeply shocked by the revelation of the Nazis’ psychopathic barbarism. Today, as it casts scarcely a glance at the pictures of the Israeli hostages that echo those shattering images of 70 years ago, the west is empowering the Nazis’ heirs.