The Bibas Deniers

There are Holocaust-deniers, who claim that accounts of the Nazi genocide are all a hoax. There are October 7 deniers, who say that Hamas did not commit any atrocities during its 2023 invasion. Now it seems that a new type of denier is emerging—the Bibas deniers.

Killers and their cheerleaders hope to obscure their crimes in a mass of impersonal statistics. It’s hard for the public to identify with millions of victims. But focusing on one or two individuals, with names and faces, dramatizes their suffering in a real and immediate way. That’s why the story of Anne Frank is so compelling. And that’s why the murders of four year-old Ariel Bibas and his nine month-old brother, Kfir, by Palestinian Arab terrorists has become such a problem for Israel’s enemies.

“Anne Frank’s baby brothers,” as the human rights scholar Thane Rosenbaum has aptly described them, are no longer part of an anonymous body count. The brutal murder of the two little boys in Gaza has come to symbolize the horrors of October 7 the same way the story of the young girl hiding in an attic in Amsterdam has come symbolize the Holocaust.

Haters of Israel understand that publicizing the truth about the Bibas murders generates sympathy for Israel and undermines the Palestinian Arab cause. That’s why they are trying to deny, or at least minimize, the Bibas killings.

The denial campaign is being led by Hamas itself—at least in its statements to the outside world. Hamas spokesman claim the boys were killed in an Israeli air strike. Israeli forensic experts who examined the children’s bodies found that in fact they were murdered with the terrorists’ bare hands. Afterwards the bodies were mutilated in a transparent attempt to disguise what had been done.

Who to believe? On the one hand, there are medical professionals who were trained in respected educational institutions. On the other hand, there is an international terrorist group that calls the Holocaust a hoax and claims The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is genuine. The Protocols is actually quoted in the Hamas charter, a fact which illustrates Hamas’s fealty to the truth.

For the emerging class of Bibas Deniers, the truth doesn’t matter. All that matters is how to absolve the killers and harm Israel.

The French politician and European Parliament member Rina Hassan tweeted that the Bibas children actually were killed by the Israelis. She reiterated that claim in a radio interview, in which she added that “Hamas has a legitimate cause.”

Omar Dajani, a law professor at the University of the Pacific, in California, recently retweeted a message asserting it is “unclear” whether Israel or Hamas killed the Bibas children. That’s like saying it is “unclear” whether the Nazis killed Jews, or they died from other causes.

Another way to help Hamas escape responsibility is the “everybody does it” approach. Zaid Tyam, who is stationed in The Hague as the representative of Fatah, the Palestinian Authority’s ruling faction, said on Egyptian television’s last week that Israel is in no position to accuse Hamas of abusing hostages such as the Bibas children, because Israel itself has “abused” the families of imprisoned terrorists by not releasing them sooner.

Meanwhile, Whoopi Goldberg, co-host of ABC Television’s The View, disrupted comments by one of her colleagues about the Bibas children. Goldberg asserted that while many people say “Hamas is the bad guy,” that is not the whole story. “But what happened to Russia?,” Goldberg asked. “Is Russia not bad with all they’ve been doing?”

Challenged by her co-hosts, Goldberg continued: “My point is, when do we stop saying it’s these folks or these folks?…This is what the enemy does to children. This is what the enemy does to children in Africa. This is what the enemy does to children all over the world because they’re the enemy….What’s happening, y’all?”

Others have different ways of trying to distract attention from the Bibas children. At the University of Michigan, students painted a large boulder in orange with the names of Ariel, Kfir, and their mother, Shiri. Pro-Hamas vandals promptly used spray paint to cover their names with the words “Free Palestine” and Hamas symbols.

Ironically, many average Gazans are not denying the Bibas murders—they’ve been celebrating them. Hamas held a public ceremony in the town of Khan Yunis, at which the Bibas children’s little coffins were displayed, just before they were handed over to Israel (in exchange for the release of killers of other Israeli children). Large, joyous crowds gathered at the scene. Families relaxed on lawn chairs, played music and sang songs. Sweets were distributed, hookah pipes were puffed. Fathers lifted their children for a better view of the coffins, in a scene eerily reminiscent of the crowds that cheered the lynchings of African-Americans in the old South.

Like Holocaust deniers, the Bibas deniers come in different varieties but they are all part of the same team: the killers, the cheerleaders, the deniers, the minimizers—they all share the same agenda: to hurt the Jews.

The appropriate way to deal with Bibas deniers is the same way decent people deal with Holocaust deniers: ostracize them. The Constitution protects their right to engage in hate speech. But it does not obligate anybody to offer them platforms.