Mick Hartley

Brendan O'Neill in Spiked – The deaths of these hostages shame the Western conscience:

When I saw the photos of the four men and two women killed by their captors in a dank lair in Rafah, I thought to myself: there are people in my community here in the UK who have defaced posters of these people. There are people on my streets who scrawled the word ‘coloniser’ on their faces. There are people in my profession who described the day they were kidnapped as a ‘day of celebration’. There are people in London – and New York, Berlin, Sydney – who expressed solidarity not with these six seized Jews, but with the racists who seized them.

And it made me think: it is not enough today to condemn Hamas. We must also ask how so many in the West came to share in Hamas’s twisted, bigoted hatred for these six human beings. Why so many in the West made excuses for their abduction, vandalised their likenesses and falsely called their persecution ‘resistance’. The barbarism uncovered in Rafah is on Hamas. But the Western conscience is not wholly innocent of this depraved crime….

But this goes beyond foolish ‘left’ apologism for Hamas. It goes beyond excuse-making for terror. There is a case to be made that the self-styled progressive conscience of the West has not been complacent in the face of Hamas’s barbarism, but complicit. Many in the West played an active role in justifying the kidnapping of people like Goldberg-Polin, Lobanov, Gat, Sarusi, Yerushalmi and Danino. They actively bolstered the kidnappers’ claims to be resistance fighters, and they actively prevented the raising of awareness of the kidnap victims, particularly through the destruction of posters featuring their faces. They were more than bystanders to a pogrom – they were unpaid PR men for the pogromists.

He's not wrong.