The Bibas Babies and the Soul of a People. “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” The Tempest (Act 1, Scene 2)
May we never forgot the Bibas babies and the jackals that stalked them even past their death.
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There are moments in history when the world is forced to stare into the abyss to confront, without equivocation, the existence of true and undiluted evil.
The murder of the Bibas babies was such a moment. No longer can we speak in the comfortable abstractions of politics and policy. I would like to say there is no excuse, but that is what I say to my son if he forgets to walk the dog. No longer can we entertain the empty rhetoric of peace processes or the delusions of coexistence. The depravity we witnessed—the strangling of infants in their coffins, the jeering of the mob, the stamping feet of those who have surrendered every shred of humanity—has revealed the soul of the beast.
“There are no words” sounds cheap and inadequate - when something is so horrifying and evil that it wounds everyone who hears and sees the photos of the beautiful innocent boys, it is beyond language.
Such evil should be unthinkable; language can only fail if thoughts are not allowed.
Surely, calling it “not human” fails; “animalistic” is an insult to animals. It is an evil society cannot accept—not for an instant. Cultural relativism, excuses, and moral equivocations are like placing a penny on the tracks to stop a train: futile, pathetic, and insulting.
There is only one response: violence.
It needs a great fist, veins bulging, knuckles jagged like mountain peaks, coming down—crushing it, leaving it unrecognizable.
And then the cleanup. Carefully wash the fingers and scrub them with a stiff brush until the skin is red and raw. Cut the nails to the quick, dry the hands, and burn the towel in the firepit. Then, never speak of it again.
For those who still claim that such acts are the work of a fringe few, consider the unearthly, frenetic, narcotic ecstasy of the crowds in Gaza. It was not a funeral procession but a skulk of jackals of one mind, fixated only on flesh and blood.
The air was thick with chants, their eyes alight with a force ancient and malignant, an unrestrained bloodlust hungering for death and desecration. This was not war. This was not collateral damage.
This was a ritual, a sacrament of annihilation, a demonic orgy of hate.
The Psychology of a Death Culture
How do people arrive at such a place? How does an entire culture become so consumed with a single, negative obsession—not the elevation of themselves but the destruction of others?
There is no psychology of nationhood here, no aspiration, no grand idealism, no striving for a better future. There is only the festering of grievance, the inheritance of bloodlust, the deliberate engorgement of appetites from infancy.
Freud, in his Civilization and Its Discontents, writes:
"The inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the greatest impediment to civilisation."
But what happens when a society actively nurtures that inclination? When aggression is not the greatest impediment to civilisation but the civilisation itself?
When from childhood, one is not taught to create but to destroy, not to cherish life but to yearn for the moment one can stamp it out?
A Culture of Rot
What does it mean when the women of a society dream not of their children growing up to live meaningful, productive lives but of them dying in a mist of blood as they collapse into their martyrdom? What does it say when mothers glorify the explosion that tears their sons askew, all well with their maternal inclinations, so long as Jewish children die alongside their boys?
Jacques Lacan, analysing hatred, noted:
"Hate is a passion that engulfs the very identity of its bearer... to hate is to dissolve oneself into negation."
This is what we see before us. A people whose only identity is hatred. A people whose school curriculum is built upon the sanctification of killing Jews, a people who dress up three-year-olds in army clothes and toy guns and clap their palms in motherly pride when their child says he hopes to kill a score of Jews; such mothering is child abuse.
What can we say of a people whose leaders funnel billions into weapons and tunnels rather than roads and hospitals? What of a people whose newspapers, television shows, and lullabies to infants whisper that to die in the act of slaughter is the highest calling?
To Hate With Every Breath
Some will try to obfuscate, and the sophists will natter forever. They will try to weave some comparison of these atrocities to civilians caught in the crossfire, to Hamas using human shields, and to tragedies of war. However, such cloth cannot be made into clothing; it will crumble into dust when you try to stitch it together, and it can bring no hint of warmth.
This was not war. The murder of the Bibas children was not a tragedy.
It was a choice.
A choice made by a people whose hearts are shrivelled husks, whose souls are tumours of poison, whose very existence is defined by negation and destruction. The blood-drunk mobs that stomped upon the earth, crazed with ecstasy at the murder of infants, were not victims of circumstance.
They were willing participants in a society that feeds on darkness, gorges itself on blood and bile, and cannot be satiated, only extinguished.
The Gazans are just like those who followed King Manasseh, the wicked king who practised child sacrifice and shed innocent blood. And finally, God said enough,
“I am bringing such disaster on Jerusalem and Judah that the ears of everyone who hears of it will tingle.”1
What happens when people follow such a king who exalts the murder of children?