Sinwar's Helpers: Foolish Pols and Useful Fools Give Hamas Reason to Smile

Last week, the German newspaper Bild broke a story that was too unsurprising to be much of one. According to Bild, a document seized from a computer used by Hamas strongman Yahya Sinwar summarized Sinwar's strategy for pressuring Israel into a ceasefire deal that would enable Hamas to promptly prepare for the next iteration of Oct. 7.

The document, reportedly approved by Sinwar, called for the torturing of the hostages that Hamas has held in Gaza's tunnels, as well as other measures aimed at forcing Israel to make concessions that would permit Hamas to resume where it left off. It reportedly called for "continu(ing) to exert psychological pressure on the families of the prisoners, both now and during the first phase (of any ceasefire), so that public pressure on the enemy government increases," focusing on exhausting the Israeli government and forcing it to agree to a ceasefire deal that would make a repeat of Hamas' Oct. 7 massacre just a matter of time.

Sinwar knows what he is doing and does it very well, reading the American left like a book and playing it like a fiddle. Getting the left to accuse the victims of a genocidal attack of "genocide" is easy as pie, as long as the victims are Israeli.

Before Israeli medics could even begin trying to identify the burned or pulverized body fragments from the innocents Hamas had massacred on Oct. 7, faculty and students at prestigious universities were blaming Israel for the slaughter. Within 48 hours of that slaughter, Sen. Edward Markey, D. Mass, demanded that Israel "de-escalate the violence." With Hamas leaders vowing to repeat its massacre again and again in accordance with a charter that calls for the genocide of Jews, The Squad was dutifully blaming Israel for genocide, not Hamas.

The moral disease on the left has metastasized into significant segments of the Democratic Party, which have drunk Hamas World's Kool-Aid with gusto.

Last week, when Sinwar ordered the cold-blooded execution of six hostages Hamas had kidnapped, he could sit back and watch gleefully while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got blamed for it. Sinwar first had these emaciated, mutilated, terrified souls beg for their lives on video. Then he had each of them shot in the head multiple times, one by one, their bodies dumped where the Israel Defense Forces would find them. And then, while the murdered hostages' families mourned and all of Israel mourned with them, he released the videos, to intensify the torture.

Savagery? Barbarism? SS-like? You bet. But speaking of betting, Sinwar bet that it would elicit barely a yawn, and that the person blamed for it would be Israel's prime minister, who has been many Democrats' convenient bogeyman all along.

There are plenty of good reasons to wish Netanyahu gone, his attempt to rig Israel's judicial system to protect himself while failing to protect his country among them. But blaming this war and the suffering it has wrought on Netanyahu is as perverse and idiotic as blaming World War II on Franklin Roosevelt.

President Joe Biden has been a stalwart friend of Israel, and a courageous one, but he has at times encouraged Sinwar to believe that it will always be Netanyahu who will be blamed for what is Hamas' sole doing. The threat to withhold weapons from Israel if its forces entered Rafah, where these hostages were held, was pandering to the left, and flat-out dumb. Vice President Kamala Harris' similar threat ("I've studied the maps") was just as bad. After Sinwar's vicious murder of the six hostages, when a reporter asked Biden whether Netanyahu was doing enough to bring peace, Biden could have stopped and asked, "Are you serious? On a day when Hamas just murdered six more? This isn't Bibi's doing. This is all on Hamas."

Instead, he answered, "No."

Hours later, his staff tried to walk it back.

About 1,300 Israelis have now been murdered by Hamas since October. How sad that their lives can't be walked back.

Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.