Pro-Palestinian demonstrators hold Palestinian flags.

How hard is it to condemn a group that strangles a baby and a toddler, mutilates their corpses with rocks to make it look like they were killed in an airstrike, then returns them amid cheering crowds in locked coffins – no keys provided – with propaganda material stuffed around the bodies?

Quite hard, as it turns out. The Prime Minister bravely said he was “deeply saddened” by the deaths but his thoughts-and-prayers statement avoided naming the perpetrators, let alone condemning their crimes.
The Red Cross, which participated in the grotesque showboating as the bodies were released, likewise omitted the guilty party in its gentle plea for “dignity and privacy”. Its defenders point to its operational neutrality; we point to its extensive record of social media posts criticising Israel and bewailing the suffering in Gaza.

Amnesty International? It may be only to be expected, but that formerly distinguished human rights organisation opined that “Hamas’s release of bodies of four Israeli hostages” served as “a heartbreaking reminder of the urgent need to immediately release all civilian hostages and Palestinians arbitrarily detained”.

Apparently, the dark alchemy of false equivalence can even transmute a statement about child victims into a rebuke of their people for lawfully incarcerating jihadi murderers.

Moreover, the UN’s position was rather undermined by its Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, who instead of condemning Hamas and mourning the Bibas family chose instead to demand on X that Spain blocks vital shipments of American arms from passing through its airports to Israel on the very day the bodies were released.

As in the echelons of international diplomacy and human rights organisations, so in our own communities. I would wager that most people reading this column will be able to cite personal examples of friends, colleagues or acquaintances who have been blaringly vocal about Palestinian suffering but find themselves in a monkish reserve when it comes to the ghoulish butchery of Jewish children and the gleeful desecration of their bodies.

One of the things that has been troubling me persistently is the deafening lack of condemnation from within British Islamic communities.

I was discussing it with a couple of Muslim friends last week. As one of them pointed out in a despairing text message yesterday: “which Imam in Britain called [Hamas] out?” Where is the true moral voice of Islam in our country? Where are the “not in my name” petitions?

Given Britain’s growing Muslim population, the moderates have to be our great hope. But they are both subjected to intimidation and intense social pressure and depressingly few in number.

Last March, a poll showed that 46 per cent of that community sympathises with Hamas; the same number, coincidentally, that were found to believe that Jews have too much power over government policy.

If October 7 taught us anything, it is that you can’t solve a problem by pretending it doesn’t exist.
One day, the enemy will find a way to break through the fence and come for your children. We must embrace and empower those who uphold our values while at the same time demanding an end to the soft affection for Hamas, so recognisable by its silence.

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