The Bibas family come home

It wasn't their fault.

In the end, they only needed the one coffin for the three of them.

Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel about 4 and baby Kfir about 9 months were buried yesterday in Israel where thousands lined the route of the funeral procession. Shiri and her two beautiful sons were buried in a single casket “wrapped in an eternal embrace.”

The mother and her two children were abducted by Hamas or Hamas inspired terrorists on Oct 7th dragged into Gaza and then murdered there.

The last images of Shiri clutching her two boys to her closely as a bunch of armed savages broke into their home, went around the world. All three were murdered in Gaza by their captors, the boys strangled to death.

This is how RTE reported the funeral: Freed Israeli hostage says ‘sorry, couldn’t protect you.’ “Hundreds of mourners gathered at a cemetery in southern Israel to bid a final farewell to Shiri Bibas and her two sons, who were killed in captivity in Gaza.”

That ‘freed Israeli hostage’ was Yarden Bibas, father and husband to Shiri, Ariel and Kfir who did try to protect his family that day but was outnumbered and out armed. That’s what Hamas do: hunt Jewish families and kill them or kidnap them. These are who Westerns, in their thousands, have been out supporting, by objecting to Israel defending the murder of defenceless men, women and children.

Too many in the West seem to think that if you start a war against civilians then that country who is supposed to defend its civilians has no right to self-defence. They seem to think you can start a war, then dictate its terms, and complain when you lose it. I can just see Londoners now writing their letters of apology to the Germans. This is the moral confusion at the heart of the West right now.

The devastated Yarden Bibas who not only lost his wife and two children in the most horrific manner possible, and was held hostage himself, also lost his parents-in-law on October 7th. He was comforted at the funeral of his family by his sister.

In his eulogy Yarden Bibas said: “Shiri, this is the closest I’ve been to you since October 7th, and I can’t kiss or hug you, and it’s breaking me!” he said and apologized to his wife and children for not being able to save them from the terrorists, despite putting up a fight. “I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you all,” he said. “Protect me from bad decisions. Shield me from harmful things and protect me from myself. Guard me so I don’t sink into darkness. Mishmish, I love you!” he said.

(My three year old is the same age as Ariel when he was abducted. Ariel also liked batman.)

Rosa Doherty in the Jewish Chronicle asks “If the bodies of babies can’t make the world care about Jewish lives, nothing can. It is not the silence itself that is earth-shattering. It is the decision to be silent about this, but not of other’s suffering.”

Rosa continued, “I don’t know any Jew since October 7, who has not felt paralysed with grief and rage about how little Jewish lives matter, particularly in the spaces of people who claim to care about injustice.

I looked online for the response from normally extremely vocal human rights charities. There was nothing from Save the Children UK about the boastful parading of dead Jewish babies, zero from UNICEF UK about the spectacle of evil.” Silence.

She also rightly says, “It is not the silence itself that is earth-shattering. It is the decision to be silent about this, but not about the suffering of others. It is deliberate, it is considered.” Exactly.

And here is the reason why I write this now; not because I think it will make any difference because it won’t. It might even annoy a fair few of my readers. Oh, here she goes again. Yes here I go again, because certainly in Ireland there are far too many who choose to be silent in the mist of this barbarism, this savagery.

Not enough people take to the streets when terrorists break into a family home, kidnap a defenceless mother and her tiny children and then strangle them to death a month later. Anyone who does say that perhaps this was a bad show, then immediately start telling you that Israel is an apartheid state.

Well, I won’t be silent in the face of this evil. I can’t be.

Rosa again, “But then If the image of a mother and her children in coffins while the monsters responsible for their death towered over them is not enough to shake the souls of ordinary people into saying something, then what is?” I don’t know. I just don’t know.

I was left wondering why I spent much of last week in tears; you are not even Jewish I said. But that’s the point, that is exactly the point; you should not have to be Jewish to be upset at what happened to the Bibas family. You just have to be human. All the dead babies of that day, and subsequently in Gaza, are on Hamas. Every single one.

Rosa finishes, “It feels trite to talk about the people who have spoken out for us and how important they are, because well, only a psychopath doesn’t care about a nine-month-old baby ripped from their bed and murdered by terrorists. “But Hamas said they were killed in Israeli air strikes” I can see the apologists typing now. And honestly, I pity them. How devoid of human decency do you have to be to hold responsible anyone other than the murderous terrorists who stole them?”

How devoid of human decency? Very. That coupled with ignorance and demented anti-Israel propaganda fuels this kind of indifference. It is everywhere and it is scary.

The truly depressing thing is that Hamas knows that they could do anything, literally anything, including murdering a baby and parading the body in a coffin a year later, and there will be plenty in the West that say somehow, somehow it’s all the fault of Israel, by which they mean the Jews.

Now matter what happens to the Jews, how many times they are targeted for being Jewish, it’s always somehow, their fault. They crucified Christ, they live separately from us, they caused the plague, they made us lose WWI - it’s always the fault of the Jews. Even the babies. It’s sick. It’s demented. It’s inhumane.

I’ve had enough.

I should know nothing about the Bibas family, nothing. They should be doing their thing in some random kibitz in Israel that I should also know nothing about. But I do, because of the sick, genocidal, hate they suffered at the hands of Hamas and civilian groups who supported them. Enough.

Pray for Yarden Bibas. The man who lost everything.

It wasn’t their fault.