HOSTAGE HORRORS IGNORED AS WORLD TURNS A BLIND EYE

Uriel Baruch was taken hostage from the Nova music festival on October 7. He was 35, had a wife, Rachel, and two little boys. He’s dead. His family was informed a few days ago that, 155 days after Uriel was dragged into captivity, only his body is now being held hostage by Hamas, somewhere in the bowels of Gaza.

As I write, 34 hostages, that we know of, have been murdered in Gaza by Hamas. That we know of. There are 96 lives that could well have suffered the same fate. It’s anyone’s guess because Hamas is the piper, and the international community is calling the tune.

I don’t understand how it’s got to this point but every time I find myself caught in this revolving door of disbelief, the answer is where it’s always been. In the collective weakness of the international community led by a complicit United Nations. Their resolution this week calling for a ceasefire was celebrated by Hamas, which merrily ignored the part where it’s supposed to return the hostages. Hamas, a proscribed terror organisation in most of the countries that voted, was afforded the charade of legitimacy that comes with negotiation.

Russia, of course, as a permanent member of the Security Council, voted for the ceasefire motion. This is the same Russia that 13 months ago, in February 2023, was ordered by the UN by a majority of 141 to five, to immediately end the war on Ukraine and withdraw. Russia has happily ignored Resolution ES-11/6 and will continue to ignore it and the UN will not do or say a thing.

The Australian Greens will not boycott Russian businesses. The unwashed, lost and emotionally homeless protesting class will not dress up in Ukrainian national costume and march the streets. They don’t care because it’s not Israel and there are no Jews to demonise.

And the events of this week, in contrast with those of last year, make this hypocrisy impossible to ignore and deny.

Jewish and Israeli hostages were taken, tortured, and with such a casual savagery, used as bloodied bargaining chips on the world stage. I say Israelis because among the hostages taken on October 7 are Muslims and Bedouin Arabs.

For all the reckless use of words like occupation and genocide, all the flights of fancy that quote international law, the world it seems has forgotten that the taking of hostages is in fact a war crime and violation of the Geneva Convention. As is the use of civilians as human shields.

As is the use of hospitals as bases for terrorism.

Or do these matters not apply to Jews or Israelis?

With the confirmed death of Uriel Baruch, it seems a prudent time to remind the world that hostage taking in the context of terrorism has been a weapon consistently and almost uniquely deployed against the Jewish people.

Since the ’60s, hostage taking has been a tool of terror that Israelis and Jews – more than any other nation and ethnicity – have had to steel themselves against.

I could actually go back thousands of years into history but let’s start in 1976.

On June 27, terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked a flight from Tel Avivi to France, diverting the plane to Entebbe, Uganda. There were 258 passengers on board. The hijackers freed everyone except 103 Jews. Read that again and let it sink in. The subsequent rescue by Israeli commandos is the stuff of legend, although three hostages and one commando tragically died. All seven terrorists were killed.

Four years earlier in 1972, nine Israeli athletes were taken hostage by militant Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Olympics.

I’ve been there, to Olympic Park. The memorial to the murdered athletes is beautiful. And too familiar.

Two men were killed when the hostage attack began. In the botched, almost amateur attempts to secure their release, the rest were murdered along with a German policeman.

In 2006, 19-year-old Gilad Shalit was taken hostage and dragged into Gaza via underground tunnels, and held by Hamas for more than five years. More than a quarter of his young life.

He was later released in a prisoner exchange deal that gave October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar his freedom. Sinwar is known as the Butcher of Khan Younis for a reason.

It’s like the international community is suffering from collective and selective amnesia. It is wilfully blind to this established pattern of violation and terror. There is now overwhelming and irrefutable proof from first-hand accounts of horrifying sexual brutalisation of female hostages. Even the UN has now reluctantly accepted it. This past week freed hostage, 40-year-old lawyer Amit Soussana, detailed how she was kept chained up in a child’s bedroom and forced to commit sex acts on her captors. She was repeatedly molested and beaten.

The men left behind are no less victims. I can’t bare to think about what they’re being subjected to. But this is, of course, Hamas. An outlawed terrorist group. Why is anyone surprised?

It’s like a macabre version of political kabuki theatre in which Israel is being pressured to abandon the remaining hostages by countries, I’m ashamed to say, like our own, that have no right to pontificate from our place of safety on the other side of the world.

We don’t have a single point of reference here in Australia that would give us permission to lecture Israel in relation to its response. Our government’s response to this crisis has been limp-wristed. Our Foreign Minister did not visit the site of the Nova atrocities, respectfully, a terrible misstep because actions, as we know, speak so much louder than words.

The Biden administration has halted funding to the hopelessly corrupt UNRWA for a minimum of one year. We simply wrote another cheque.

There has been so much, frankly, embarrassing use of the word occupation without any reference, for example, to Egypt and its monstrous, imposing, watertight Rafah border. Closed today, as it has been since and long prior to October 7. It’s a highly inconvenient truth, consistently overlooked, that Egypt made peace with Israel on March 26, 1979, has kept it ever since, and continues to keep the border with Gaza hermetically sealed. Israel and Egypt are not allies, but they have kept peace because Egyptians are not, as a whole, ideologically committed to the destruction of Jews. Why do we ignore the obvious?

This war would have been over months ago if the international community had just looked to the past. If it had made a halfway educated guess based on past behaviours, and shown strength against terror.

You can argue a ceasefire all you like but it’s a pointless process when Hamas repeatedly says no, as it did yet again this past week. And I’m going to say what many of you I know must be thinking. There is one plausible reason Hamas is refusing to agree to a ceasefire and hostage exchange. All but a few are now dead. Murdered.

I hope and pray that I’m wrong.