Jerusalem Bureau Chief Patrick Kingsley displayed the crazed priorities at the New York Times in a Saturday front-page “news analysis” (editorial).
The curious headline was “Family’s Fate Pierces Israel, Fraying Truce,” referring to the murdered young Bibas children displayed in coffins as props by the bloodthirsty Hamas savages, to the cheers of hundreds of Palestinians.
Kingsley could only fret about what Israel’s (wholly justified) rage might do to harm the anti-Israel international community’s precious “ceasefire” between Israel and Hamas, in a war started by Hamas. It's like the old joke where you express concern that the worst consequence of 9/11 was the Islamophobia.
Kingsley sounded almost regretful that the two Israeli children murdered by Hamas, one a four-year-old and the other an infant, are still being remembered in Israel.
For 16 months, the smiling faces of Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir, had been slowly receding into the background of Israeli life as their photographs -- posted on walls and bus stops soon after the family’s abduction to Gaza in October 2023 -- began to fade, tear and peel.
On Friday, the Bibases’ lives and disturbing deaths were swept back to the forefront of Israel’s collective consciousness in such a startling and unsettling way that it set off fresh alarm about the long-term fate of the fragile cease-fire in Gaza....
Even as Kingsley quoted the Israeli military that the two boys had been killed by terrorists “with their bare hands," he felt the need to both-sides the atrocity.
For Palestinians, the devastation wrought by Israel’s military response to the Oct. 7 raids -- a reaction that, among other consequences, razed Palestinian burial grounds and killed thousands of children including some younger than Kfir Bibas -- has long overshadowed Hamas’s terrorist attacks at the start of the war.
But Israelis remain deeply traumatized by the October assault, and the return of the Bibas boys, coupled with the uncertainty about their mother’s whereabouts and the disrespectful way that Hamas paraded their coffins on Thursday, revived the torment.
“Disrespectful” is certainly one way to describe the obscenity of the scene.
Kingsley, who worked for seven years at the socialist British newspaper The Guardian, implied Israel was overreacting with talk of vengeance, and stood up for the Palestinian people, who are apparently judged on different scales that the rest of humanity (only 40% now support the mass murder of October 7).
Responding to the military’s announcement, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel returned to the language of vengeance that defined his speeches in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack.
“May God avenge their blood,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a recorded speech to the nation on Friday morning. “And we will also have our vengeance.”
The seething tenor of Mr. Netanyahu’s response was maintained across much of the Israeli political spectrum. Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister, said in a broadcast interview that the Bibases’ treatment showed how “the majority of Gazans want to murder all of the Israelis.” (Polling last fall suggested that less than 40 percent of Gazan Palestinians supported the Oct. 7 attack, down from more than 70 percent early last year.)
There's always an excuse for Palestinian terrorism in the wokeness.
This combination of vulnerability and vengeance was compounded by the overnight news that, according to the Israeli security services, terrorists had detonated bombs on several buses across central Israel. The vehicles were empty at the time. Commentators said that the attacks were possibly a response to ongoing Israeli military operations in the occupied West Bank, which have displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes.
Kingley, whose antipathy toward Netanyahu has a long pedigree, ended his editorial lamenting the “ceasefire” peaceniks were on the backfoot against the ruthless “far-right.”
“If it’s up to Netanyahu and his far-right coalition associates, then next week -- following the ending of the hostage deal’s first stage with the return of four more bodies of hostages -- the road for renewing the war in Gaza will be set,” wrote Amos Harel, a commentator on military affairs for Haaretz, a left-leaning newspaper. “This time, they promise, without restraints.”
