Greenfield: Posters of Kidnapped Israeli Kids are Traumatizing Hamas Supporters

On city streets and on campuses across the country, posters of kidnapped Jewish families, women and children are being torn down by Hamas supporters. Why are they doing it?

Students for Justice in Palestine at Drew University issued a statement claiming that the posters of abducted children “use triggering and insensitive language” and “delegitimize the need for Palestinian resistance”.

Drew’s SJP chapter had responded to the Hamas massacres, rapes and kidnappings by hailing them as “an act of resistance” against the “Zionist Imperialist Territories” and defending the atrocities by arguing that “every Israeli civilian has served, is serving, or will serve in the Israeli Defense Forces” so that “all Israelis citizens are inherently complicit in the occupation of Palestine”. That presumably includes the Jewish babies and children murdered by Hamas: including Noya Dan, a 12-year-old autistic girl, killed along with her 80-year-old grandmother.

That’s nothing less than a defense for the extermination of the Jews by a campus organization.

The Students for Justice in Palestine chapter finds it “triggering” to actually see posters of its victims and complains that they “delegitimize” Hamas. It’s traumatic for Hamas supporters to see their terrorist organization cast in a bad light for kidnapping kids. Colleges are supposed to be safe spaces for terrorists and their supporters to celebrate their atrocities and cry when their victims fight back. It’s certainly not a place where terrorists should ever be made to feel bad.

Will no one feel any pity for the trauma of terrorist supporters traumatized by their victims?

The New York Times, which loves terrorists almost as much as SJP does, described tearing down the posters of kidnapped women, children and senior citizens as “its own form of protest” and a “release valve” which is no doubt as true of it as it is of Klansmen burning crosses on lawns.

Like most forms of pro-terrorist protest, which includes blocking roads and assaulting Jewish students, it’s destructive and malicious, and so properly represents the ‘Palestinian’ cause.

The cowardly ‘rippers’ when caught often try to hide their faces or play the victim.

Miles Grant, a leftist activist who tears down the posters, complained to the New York Times that they suffered from a “lack of context” of “why did this happen”. The problem with the posters was that they failed to explain why the hostages had it coming.

Grant then conspiratorially accused the Jews responsible of putting them up in order “to bait people to take them down”. And by taking them down, he wasn’t a perpetrator, he was a victim of a cunning plot to make him look like a monster.

“I think it’s disgusting how they’re trying to destroy people’s lives,” the man who is trying to cover up the plight of kidnapped children fumed.

Worse still, the Jews even put families within driving distance of Gaza to bait Hamas terrorists into torturing, raping and killing them, all just as an excuse to destroy Miles Grant’s life.

Rafael Shimunov, a veteran anti-Israel activist, claimed that the kidnapped posters were “being used to target Palestinians” and urged Jews “to understand why they’re taking them down.”

It’s not the terrorist supporters that are intolerant for tearing down the posters of the hostages, but the Jews who are intolerant for not understanding how the terrorists are the real victims.

The Left claims that even the lightest forms of memorializing Jewish victims of Islamic terrorism is a form of violence whereas the murder, rape and kidnapping of Jews is an act of resistance. And when war is peace and peace is war, then tearing down posters becomes an act of peace.

In Florida, Ahmed ElKoussa, who was caught ripping down posters, claimed that he was trying “to promote peace, it’s to deescalate the situation that we’re going through and make sure that our communities are safe.” Safety and peace, at least within Islam, come from attacking Jews.

After massacring over 1,000 Jews, Hamas in Gaza is the official victim now that Israel started fighting back. But even the most non-violent form of speech also makes terrorists into victims.

A poster of a kidnapped child is now an Islamophobic hate crime.

In the UK, the Met Police claimed that they were tearing down the posters as part of some “reasonable steps to stop issues escalating and to avoid any further increase in community tension.” Muslim rallies calling for jihad have not been shut down because they don’t escalate anything or lead to community tensions, but posters of kidnapped people escalate tensions.

Similar scenes of government action were seen in Germany and other parts of Europe.

What the story of the posters reveals is that any resistance to Islamic terrorism is unacceptable. A poster of kidnapped Israeli hostages is as bad as an Israeli air strike taking out a Hamas terrorist. To justify Hamas atrocities, their supporters, like Students for Justice in Palestine, must dehumanize Israelis as monsters, occupiers, soldiers and settlers, and any depiction of them as human, let alone images of kidnapped elderly women and children, must be suppressed.

In April 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, along with General Patton and General Bradley, visited the first concentration camp liberated: Ohrdruf: a sub-camp of the infamous Buchenwald. The Nazis, who had been using prisoners to prepare an underground bunker for the regime, killed whom they could before fleeing, leaving behind emaciated corpses lying everywhere.

Patton threw up while Eisenhower wrote, “I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world!” Afterward Patton ordered the Nazi mayor and his wife to witness what was done. They came, they saw, and then went home and killed themselves.

So too the ‘rippers’ who don’t want to see the consequences of the crimes they support.

Eisenhower and Patton forced ordinary Nazis to come face to face with what they had supported. At Ohrdruf and other places, Nazi civilians were forced to bury the dead. After years of propaganda, they could no longer deny the atrocities that their movement had committed.

On college campuses, the new Nazis drink vegan lattes instead of schnapps, but like the townsfolk living near the camps, they don’t want to see what it is they support. Jews haven’t hung up posters of corpses, only those of the living, but even so it’s too much for them. Like the Nazis, their postmodern descendants play the victim when forced to witness the least of it.

They don’t want to see evidence of their crimes. That’s why it’s vital to make them see.

Hamas supporters, like Nazis, should be traumatized, they should be confronted with evidence of their crimes, and if that upsets them, if the “insensitive language” triggers those Hamas supporters who celebrated the mass murder of the innocent, so much the better.

Evil thrives in echo chambers and bubbles. On streets and campuses across America, Hamas supporters tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis are being confronted with their evil.

There may be no way to make them bury the dead, but they can at least face the living.