Sean Speer: The return of the Bibas family’s bodies is a cruel reminder of what Israel is fighting for

This week we finally learned the fates of Shiri Bibas and her young sons Kfir and Ariel who were just aged nine months and four years when they were ripped from their home by Hamas terrorists on October 7.

On Thursday, they’re set to return home in body bags murdered by the same monsters who had separated them from their father Yarden.

As we’ve learned, Yarden gave himself up that day in the hope that if he went with the terrorists, they’d spare his family.

I’ve thought about his decision a lot in the past couple of weeks. As a father, I almost certainly would have done the same. Ostensibly Hamas was targeting military-aged men, not infants and toddlers.

Tragically, he was wrong. His mistake was to attribute a moral logic to his family’s tormentors. This wasn’t some high-minded act of political resistance. These were Jew-hating murderers who were determined to kill babies and seniors and anyone in between.

It was one thing for Yarden to be proven wrong in the moment. He needed to make a judgment in excruciating circumstances without the full knowledge of Hamas’s barbarism that day.

But what about those around the world who in the months since the terrible attacks have opted to side with Hamas over Kfir and Ariel? How do we explain their choices?

Such choices have come in different forms. Some were moved to tear down the Bibas’ posters from lamp posts. Others were moved to protest, intimidation, and even violence in favour of the Hamas cause.

Most, however, were acts of omission. They were expressions of silence or double standards or both.

These are the people who were more responsive to Hamas propaganda than the searing video of a terrified Shiri trying to protect her boys. Or who couldn’t bring themselves to condemn their kidnapping. Or who have remained silent in light of this week’s reports of their murder.

In some ways, the radical activists in the first two groups are easier to reckon with. Any society is to be marked by some minority of moral degenerates. They should be condemned, confronted, and where appropriate, subject to legal sanction.

The third group poses a bigger challenge though because moral obtuseness is much more widespread and harder to discern. This includes, by the way, the academics, journalists, politicians, and the special representatives on Islamophobia who present two-sideism as somehow more enlightened and sophisticated than crude yet proper questions like “But what about Kfir and Ariel?”

These people may not think of themselves as the same as the first two groups but the differences are a matter of degree. The latter’s lack of moral clarity has enabled the former’s moral perversion. They are the intellectual accomplices to those who have wreaked havoc on our streets in support of Hamas or in hostility to Jews or both.

The tragic episode has left us with a hard fact. When faced with what ought to be a simple choice between the Bibas family and the terrorists who murdered them, either through enmity or indifference, far too many of our fellow citizens have seemingly chosen the terrorists.

It’s a cold realization that leaves little room for middle ground. Appeals to liberalism and pluralism don’t provide satisfactory answers to the university professor who promotes the hatred of Jews or the government appointee who posted about Islamophobia on the same day that a Jewish school in Montreal was subject to a shooting or a 670 percent spike in antisemitic incidents over the past year alone.

We’ve once again been exposed to the virulence of antisemitism and its capacity to fester and grow under the protection of liberal democracy. Its pernicious purveyors and the empty equivalentists who’ve enabled them have found comfort, sanction, and even public subsidies in our open-ended system of individual freedom and moral relativism.

I don’t quite know the path forward. But I know when this is over—whenever it is—I can’t go back to a time when I hadn’t seen what I’ve seen over the past 16 months. I’ll never unsee the little faces of Kfir and Ariel.

For now, my mind sadly turns to Yarden who was freed more than two weeks ago to the awful news that his wife and children weren’t waiting for him. Now he learns that they’re gone. God bless Yarden Bibas and his beautiful family.