Commentary
Where are the widespread calls across Canada to release the Israeli hostages? That’s the question that we should be asking whenever we see a livestream of a pro-Palestinian protest or watch as a politician calls for a ceasefire.
That’s the whole reason this mess is happening. The despicable actions of Hamas on Oct. 7 are what brought us to this point. Everything else is secondary to that issue. If you want to deal with the problems that have arisen since then, you first have to get the hostages released.
This isn’t like past flare-ups in the Middle East, and there’s no denying it.
We’ve become tragically used to intermittent violence arising between Israelis and Palestinians. We’ve also developed stock responses. People take sides. They then offer up what are now familiar refrains.
Those ways of thinking don’t fit now, though. The cookie-cutter responses just won’t do. This current conflagration takes things to a whole new level.
Hamas terrorists went into Israel and brutally murdered hundreds of innocent civilians at an all-night music festival, at a kibbutz, and multiple other civilian locations. They then took 200 hostages, including babies, children, and seniors. All but a few of those hostages are still being held. Still.
It doesn’t take an advanced military theorist to tell you that the moving of hostages into Gaza was obviously an attempt by Hamas to draw Israeli forces onto their turf to provoke a ground confrontation. They knew what they were getting. And as long as there are still Israeli hostages held captive by Hamas, this remains an active terror attack.
There isn’t enough acknowledgement of that. There are too many people who are either trying to move on from this basic fact or are in denial of it. To talk about the next steps of this conflict when the hostages are still detained is like talking about reconstructing a burned down building while it’s still engulfed in flames.
Any statement issued by a government, politician, or organization that doesn’t include a call to release the hostages isn’t a serious statement. If you want a ceasefire, if you want Israel to scale back its response, if you want prosperity for Palestinians… well, none of that can happen until the hostages are released.
There are groups working hard to drive this message home. On Oct. 19, hundreds of demonstrators took to Times Square in Manhattan to call for the release of the hostages, chanting “bring them home.” A number of the billboards at Times Square were lit up with “missing” signs featuring pictures of hostages, including the kidnapped babies.
What’s alarming though is that not more people are repeating this refrain. It should be the one line we hear repeated ad nauseam by everyone. It’s the precondition to getting us to a better place.
If people participating in pro-Palestinian protests want to prove that they are in fact motivated by concern for the well-being of regular people in Gaza and not in fact there to support Hamas, then they’d be well-advised to call for a release of the hostages. Yet they don’t. That call is nowhere to be seen or heard at these events.
U.S. President Joe Biden has vowed to bring the hostages home (around a dozen of them are American). Here in Canada, though, our politicians and media are mostly ignoring the issue of the hostages. If they do mention it, it’s as an afterthought.
The one Canadian public figure who has had an unyielding moral clarity on the issue is Bob Rae, the former Ontario premier and federal Liberal leader who is now serving as our Ambassador to the United Nations.
“Any organization like this has to be destroyed,” Rae said on X, commenting on a video about the way Hamas butchered civilians. “And no one should condone or excuse or underplay or deny. Dealing with it will require determination and strategy.”
The ongoing terror Hamas is still inflicting after spending a year planning their assault and capture of civilians has made this issue different than when it was a conversation about land or tit-for-tat rocket fire.
Determination is right.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
