Placing the blame where it belongs – with Hamas

Not a day goes by that there isn’t some article in the paper, placing the blame for the ills of Gazans who are no longer able to work in Israel or the plight of Gazans who have lost their homes and are now hungry. 

Today was no different. The headlines read: “Babies born into Gaza war unwashed and underfed.” The story, originally picked up by Reuters, talks about a grandmother whose “simple wish for her twin baby granddaughters is for them to be in a clean, safe room where they can be bathed. Instead, the infants are living in a tent in a camp for displaced people in Rafah, southern Gaza. Their mother cannot breastfeed them, because she is not getting enough nutrition for her body to produce milk. And they have never been bathed.”

Who wouldn’t be mortified to read such a story? The tragic results of the Gazan people, however, begin and end with their terrorist government whose actions on Oct. 7 created the hell on earth that these people are now living daily.

The problem is that the media and all those who already despise Israel are using these horrific events of the plight of the Palestinians to cleverly swap out villains by only concentrating on the suffering of one side. This is called disingenuous reporting, but it doesn’t stop there. Once these stories are disseminated, people run with these sanitized versions and shore up their assertion that Israel is the oppressor and Hamas the oppressed. The original savage attack of Israelis who were slaughtered, butchered, burned alive, raped, tortured and kidnapped is subsequently obscured. 

The lopsided message then becomes that Gaza victims trump Jewish victims. It’s horrible that it has to come to that, but those are the narratives that sell. So, the stories keep coming. Gazans are dying in masse, Gazans are starving, Gazans have no money or homes. Every possible misfortune that has happened to these people is being blamed squarely on the shoulders of Israel, but everyone knows, even if they refuse to acknowledge it, that none of this would be happening if Oct. 7 had been just another day as the previous one.

Gazan men would still be pouring into Israel by the thousands, in order to earn their livelihoods. Mothers would be giving birth to babies in clean hospitals where they could be bathed. Families would be eating normally, and everyone would be safely tucked away in their homes. But those inconvenient facts don’t serve to demonize Israel, and that is the goal. Get everyone to hate and blame Israel and then, just as recent polls of pro-Palestinian young people have shown, you, too, can justify the genocide of Jewish Israelis because they are worse than Hitler.

Blame is the useful instrument that helps to further the goal of despising a people who have only been tolerated, at best, for centuries but who have clearly remained the scapegoat when it comes to pointing a finger at someone. Vilifying someone, solely on the basis of their ethnicity, is not justifiable, so the blame becomes a useful cover-up for real perpetrators of the most heinous crimes that one could imagine.

Majed El Shafie, an Egyptian convert to Christianity, had the courage to call this out when he recently visited Israel and gave an interview to The Jerusalem Post. He said, “I would like to thank Hamas for ‘showing the world the ugly face of extremism’ and ‘for displaying the rise of antisemitism in Western countries – no one was aware of how bad it was.”

Unafraid to call out Hamas for the barbaric terror group that they are, he fearlessly placed the blame where it belongs – with the terror group! Despite his own childhood indoctrination of being taught to hate Jews, he couldn’t help but see the hypocrisy in his own society which was rife with discrimination towards minorities. From the moment he began to ask questions, he became a marked man, eventually being arrested, tortured and sentenced to death. It wasn’t until he escaped and made his way to Israel that he was able to express the truth about the real monsters and the barbarism of which they are capable. Knowing what he does today, he says, “Hamas is determined to commit a second Holocaust in Israel. We must not agree to a ceasefire.”

El Shafie heads a human rights organization called, “One Free World International” (OFWI), which has taken up an investigation into what exactly happened on that fated day. He’s titled his report: “The Truth Behind the Hamas Massacre on October 7th" and will “meet with security officials, massacre survivors and the families of hostages.”

His investigation leaves no speculation as to where the blame lies for everything that has happened as a result of the vicious, surprise Hamas attack. He has carefully followed the trail which has led to the meticulous training of these operatives, from a variety of terror organizations, and has noted their strong similarities to another brutal regime, concluding that some of the October 7th terrorists had been former ISIS members. He backs this up with the discovery of two ISIS flags which were found in the areas that were attacked.

Claiming that Iran was behind all of this, El Shafie categorically states that Gazans also assisted in the attack, helping Hamas pull it off. This is emphasized by his contention that “the majority of Gazans were rejoicing” (following the attack). 

Of course, this belies the often-repeated assertion that the Gazan people are innocent victims in this tragedy who do not deserve the suffering that they have been forced to endure. But El Shafie does not equivocate when saying that “the report also stresses that Hamas is hurting the Palestinians even more than the Israelis by denying them fundamental human rights, by using civilians as human shields, and by orchestrating the massacre from Qatar, ‘where the leadership is drinking champagne and smoking cigars while the Palestinian people are suffering. They carry the responsibility for every bit of suffering happening to the Palestinians.”

Lastly, El Shafie, also, believes that the tactic of blaming Israel for Palestinian suffering has been a purposeful move in order to foment international hatred against the Jewish state, but then anyone with a working brain could have figured that out, because look how well it has worked. Everyone fell right in line with their expected roles in portraying Israel as the oppressors – the media, the far left, college campuses, ignorant protesters, searching for a cause, and all the other usual suspects.

There is a lot to admire in a man who has the courage to call a spade a spade. Would that more like him come forward to unashamedly declare to the world that the Hamas terror organization is the real monster that deserves full blame for the suffering of both Israelis and Gazans alike. And would the world have the honesty and courage to open their eyes and see the truth that is right in front of them?