In the wake of Hamas’ barbaric attack on Israel last weekend, there is no shortage of questions to be answered or accountability to be taken, from the role played by the Obama and Biden administrations’ empowerment of Iran to why US and Israeli intelligence agencies got caught so flat-footed.
But one subtly troubling question should vex us all: Why would Hamas release video evidence of its atrocities for the world to see?
The damning answer is that its leaders believed that doing so would be a boon to their efforts.
How could the public-relations advantages of hand-wrapping and delivering raw, visceral footage of yourself committing the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust outnumber the drawbacks?
Sadly, it’s not an entirely unreasonable calculation.
After all, the West has a well-documented statute of limitations on sympathy for the Jewish people and the world’s only Jewish-majority state.
When the victims are Jews, the outrage over crimes that most of us can hardly fathom — mass rape, the beheading of babies, the gleeful torment of Holocaust survivors — always fades faster than one would rationally expect.
So the assumption was that the potential psychological damage the footage could inflict on Israelis — as well as the inspiration it would provide Jew-haters around the world — would outlast and outweigh the moral outrage that would underpin support for Israel’s inevitable military response.
Hamas and its sympathizers are evil and they delight in evil — this much most of us take for granted.
But we’re loath to admit that our unwillingness to sustain moral clarity after the ancient evil of antisemitism rears its incomparably ugly head empowers these actors not only to do the unthinkable, but to benefit from boasting about it.
Less than a week after the attack, there has already been a sinister shift in tone around the coverage of the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
Instead of maintaining the initial, near-universal disgust for the crimes committed against humanity in southern Israel, some are casting doubt on whether it was really all that bad.
The Los Angeles Times affixed an editor’s note to a column that mentioned the rape of Israeli women, inexplicably claiming that those reports had not been “substantiated.”
Eyewitness accounts of rape from the music festival where Hamas took 260 lives don’t suffice for the Times?
The videos of female hostages with bloody crotches aren’t enough for editors to acknowledge the extent of their suffering?
A similar skepticism gripped some after it was first reported that Jewish babies had been beheaded in the attack.
Without the slightest hint of shame or self-awareness, these voices demanded that proof up to and including actual pictures of decapitated children’s heads be produced.
Moreover, instead of maintaining an understanding of who bears responsibility for the deaths of Gazan civilians in the days to come, media coverage is already beginning to reflect a skepticism of Israeli action in Gaza.
“Civilian casualties soar in Gaza Strip,” blared The Washington Post’s front page Friday.
In the article, the Post’s reporters credulously cited the casualty counts tallied by the Palestinian Health Ministry, which operates under the supervision of Hamas in Gaza.
Hamas, for those who haven’t yet noticed, has an interest in exaggerating these figures.
The New York Times similarly identified Friday’s lead story as the worsening “Humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” which it pinned on “six days of Israeli airstrikes.”
“Israel is pummeling Gaza with a ferocity not seen in past conflicts,” it lamented.
The memory of innocent Jews dying is fading, and the mile-wide, inch-deep narrative of a disproportionate Jewish response is being constructed.
What does it say about the West that Hamas knows us so well that it’s willing to make such a high-stakes PR gamble — and potentially win it?
Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite.