Thoughts After the Bibas Funeral

World landmarks lit up in honour of the Bibas family

​By Olivia Pierson

First published on the Good Oil, 28th February 2025
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I watched the funeral for the Bibas family. My God, Israel showed up in support of Yarden Bibas and the nation’s collective heartbreak was clear to see.
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There are moments in human history so vile, so utterly dehumanising, that they lodge in your soul like shrapnel never to be extracted. What happened to Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas – snatched from their home by Hamas savages on October 7th, 2023 – is one such moment.
 
I’m not Jewish, neither by blood nor faith, but I don’t need to be.

Generally, evil doesn’t care about your bloodline or beliefs and neither should your recognition of it. Hamas-style evil, however, does care, especially if your bloodline is Jewish; then their evil wants to eradicate you from the Earth. This wasn’t just an attack on a family; it was an assault on the very idea of innocence, a stain on the world that half my peers – brainwashed and spineless – seem content to shrug off. I don’t want to live in a reality where this is possible, let alone sanctioned by the smugnorance of so many talking heads who ought to know better.

For 15 years I’ve often tried to highlight the rot at the heart of Islam – its jihadist core. Ideas matter, and I was raised to know that. Islam’s ideology is the very motherlode of horrible ideas bundled into one so-called religion. But last week totally flattened me. I can’t unsee those tiny boys, Ariel and Kfir, torn from their loving home, or Shiri’s terror as her entire world was smashed. Everything else – New Zealand’s petty political dramas, our smallminded squabbles – feels like meaningless theatrical fluff next to what Israel faces. Hamas isn’t their only enemy; it’s the whole festering ‘Palestinian’ cause, the Gazan mobs and, now, since that cursed day in 2023, the global, in-your-face, resurgence of open Jew-hatred.

This isn’t just Israel’s fight. Western civilisation has been suicidally liberal, flinging open its gates to the Islamic world since the “Migrant Crisis” of 2014 (and before). Remember ISIS carving its way through Iraq and Syria while the EU and the UN guilt-tripped nations into absorbing millions of fighting-age men from misogynistic and Jew-hating cultures? Now terror attacks have become a twice weekly occurrence in countries where, only 20 years ago, they would’ve been virtually unthinkable.

The Bibas atrocity played out on every screen (except in New Zealand’s gutless, dying media), and what’s the response? A chorus of ‘what about the Palestinian kids Israel bombed?’ from Candace Owens’ acolytes and beyond. Let’s get this straight: Israel didn’t kidnap children from their beds and slaughter them for political theatre: Hamas did. This isn’t a numbers game or a diplomatic balls-up, like Ukraine’s NATO-pushed war with Russia. It’s evil, pure and simple, and the predicates to war bloody matter. That’s on the Arabs of Judea and Samaria – otherwise known as the Palestinians.  After hearing that Shiri, Ariel and Kfir had been slain – and because the atrocity was so revoltingly egregious, President Javier Milei fittingly ordered two days of mourning for this family in Argentina.



New Zealand’s leaders? Mute. Australia’s? A pathetic whimper.


Meanwhile, half the West’s chattering class is so conquered they can’t even name the crime without deflections completely dominating their narratives: ‘Israel has been mean to Palestinians for years,’ they say, ‘and needs to do more to alleviate Gaza’s perpetual suffering.’ Tell that to Shiri Bibas. Tell that to her boys. Tell it to peace-activist Oded Lifshitz and his grieving wife, Yocheved. Tell it to the families of those whose loved ones are still held in captivity in underground tunnels.

​I’m done with the amoral platitudes. This is a wake-up call and, if we don’t heed it, we’re not just betraying Israel – we’re burying our own civilisation.