State legislators call for ceasefire and “unconditional release” of Hamas terrorists captured by Israel in letter to Biden and congressional delegation.

Democratic state legislators are urging President Biden and the Connecticut congressional delegation to secure the release of Hamas terrorists held in Israel. In a letter circulated last week to be sent April 1st, the legislators, 9 House member and 3 members of the Senate, ask Biden and the state’s two senators and five representatives “to prioritize the safety and well-being of all hostages and detainees in both Gaza and Israel, recognizing their right to freedom and unconditional release.” Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) is estimated to have captured hundreds of Hamas fighters.

The legislators do not call for the release of hostages held by Hamas as a condition of a ceasefire.

In a chilling display of moral equivalency, the signers equate hostages kidnapped by Hamas on October 7th with the terrorists and their abettors captured by Israeli troops. There are no detainees in Gaza. There are only hostages, six of them are thought to be Americans. There are no hostages in Israel. There are detainees, the Hamas fighters and their accomplices held in Israel, no longer free to slaughter Jews. Releasing them would be a prelude to more violence.

More than 240 hostages were kidnapped and taken to Gaza in the October 7th attack on Israel that saw Hamas revel in its slaughter of 1,200 people. Hamas and other terrorist organizations are estimated to be holding 130 terrorists, though as many as 50 may be dead, according to Israeli estimates, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Curiously, Hamas is not named in the four-paragraph letter. It does, however, minimize the October 7th massacre of 1,200 people in southern Israel as merely connecting “to a history of conflict….” Because, that phrase suggests, October 7th was one more day in a continuum of strife. In January, Hamas described the attack as a “necessary step” against Israel. The Israeli government has vowed to destroy Hamas, a necessary step to peace and security in the region.

On March 25th, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire. The resolution does not make the release of the hostages held by Hamas a condition of a ceasefire, nor does it condemn Hamas. The United State, in an ill-judged decision, abstained on the resolution.

The dozen signatories loftily declare themselves as joining “with voices of conscience in Connecticut and around the world in recognizing the imperative need for an immediate, mutual, and permanent ceasefire in the assault on Gaza.” Their solution is the restoration of Hamas, allowing it to continue to fight to annihilate Israel and Jews, while consigning Palestinians to the continued brutal rule of terrorists. Imagine the sort of conscience that mistakes bolstering a murderous regime for virtue.

The legislators, exercising their copyright on conscience, limit their ceasefire call to “the assault in Gaza.” Their letter does not condemn the more than 12,000 rockets Hamas has fired on Israel since October 7th or the tens of thousands of Israelis evacuated from their homes near the democratic nation’s northern border because of rockets fired by Hezbollah, another Iran-backed terror organization.

The way forward is not hard to identify. “The central cause of Gaza’s misery is Hamas. It alone bears the blame for the suffering it has inflicted on Israel and knowingly invited against Palestinians,” wrote Bret Stephens in The New York Times on October 15th. “The best way to end the misery is to remove the cause, not stay the hand of the remover.”

David Brooks confirmed that reality five months later in a widely read March 24th extended column, also in The New York Times. There will be more misery on both sides as long as Hamas, with hundreds of miles of tunnels from which to emerge to fight and then retreat to, continues to place Palestinian civilians between itself and the IDF.

“Israel and the Palestinians have both just suffered shattering defeats. Maybe in the next few years they will do some difficult rethinking, and a new vision of the future will come into view,” Brooks concludes. “But that can happen only after Hamas is fully defeated as a military and governing force.”

The unconditional release of Hamas fighters from captivity in Israel would, as the Connecticut Democratic legislators might euphemistically describe it, extend and continue to connect the barbarous to “a history of conflict.”

Published March 30, 2024.