Farhan al-Qadi reminds us of what it means to be a hero.
"90 percent of the residents in Israel, Muslims, Jews, Bedouins, are together, one family, one people, Jewish and Arab. No one can take away that togetherness."~ rescued Muslim/Israeli hostage al-Qadi
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Rescued Israeli hostage Farhan al-Qadi, speaks about being a Muslim Arab Israeli in Hamas captivity. This is who a hero is. This is what a hero does.
In an interview with Channel 12 News, al-Qadi described his last 11 months, from when he was taken hostage while at work near Kibbutz Magen by the Gaza border until his rescue. You can watch al-Qadi’s interview here.
Here is an account of what happened to Farhan al-Qadi :
“I saw 100 meters from me where three Hamas terrorists were shooting in my direction and running toward me,” he said.
Al-Qadi said they caught him and when they realized he was a Muslim demanded that he take them in his car to “wherever we can find Jews.”
“I was prepared to die rather than point them to a Jew, not even to a cat. The whole moshav are good friends of mine,” he said.
When he refused to show them where Jews might be, the terrorists shot him in the leg, knocked him to the ground, and tied his hands behind his back.
Al-Qadi was then thrown into a car and taken to Gaza where he saw a group of foreign workers being taken down into a tunnel. At this point, his leg was in so much pain he couldn’t walk and one of the terrorists decided to take him to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.
Since he couldn’t walk, al-Qadi was forced to climb up the stairs in the hospital on all fours. As they watched him, he said, they laughed and said, “Look, here’s our dog walking.”
“There were a lot of people and you could see their joy; they felt like they’d won,” al-Qadi recalled.
Eventually, he was taken to see two doctors who sewed up his injury without anesthetic while interrogating him.
“I told them that the pain in my soul was worse than the pain in my leg. I was thinking of my family and how they wouldn’t have Farhan anymore,” he said.
After his leg was sewn up, al-Qadi was taken to the same room as 85-year-old diabetic Aryeh Zalmanovich, a hostage from Nir Oz who was injured in his head and hand.
The two were kept in the same room for a month and a half, with Zalmanovich in the bed and al-Qadi sitting in the chair.
“He told me stories. He had a granddaughter he loved so much and two sons who live up north, and he talked about them every chance he got,” al-Qadi recalled, adding that some mornings Zalmanovich would tell him he had dreamed the two had been released together.
Eventually, al-Qadi was moved to a different room alone, and Zalmanovich was moved to the same room a week later. Over the next few days, al-Qadi said, Zalmanovich’s health deteriorated drastically and he barely spoke.
“The day he died, at around noon, he started to talk. I got up and went closer to him, and he was saying goodbye to the kibbutz, goodbye to his friends, goodbye to his granddaughter… It broke me. I tried to talk to him, I was calling him ‘Aryeh, Aryeh,’ but nothing. He wasn’t hearing me. And then it was all over,” said al-Qadi, adding that he had come to feel like Zalmanovich was his family.
A couple of hours later, al-Qadi was taken into a room with Zalmanovich’s body, two Hamas terrorists, and a videographer and was ordered to say that Zalmanovich had been gravely ill and they had done everything they could to help him.
A few weeks later, al-Qadi was moved to a house in Khan Younis that was destroyed in an airstrike the next morning. Hamas then waited until civilians began evacuating from the city to camouflage al-Qadi among them, and he was taken to a tent that was kept closed.
From there, al-Qadi was taken to a tunnel that was accessed under a house, where he spent the next eight months.
He was found and rescued by IDF troops last week, and he said the soldiers welcomed him warmly but the welcome he got back in Israel was not as warm.
Al-Qadi described being criticized and threatened over the last week after the right-wing Channel 14 quoted him saying that he saw himself as Palestinian more than Israeli. In fact, what he had said was that it didn’t matter whether someone was Israeli or Palestinian; everyone deserved to be free.
“It really hurts me,” he said. “I was shot in the leg because I didn’t want to give up Jews. That’s how we grew up, that’s how my grandfather grew up, and it’s how my children are growing up. Ninety percent of the residents in Israel, Muslims, Jews, Bedouins, are together, one family, one people, Jewish and Arab. No one can take away that togetherness,” he said.
This is how rational, normal people talk, that we are all together, on family, one people. No matter a person’s religion, ethnicity, homeland, we are all united in our humanity. But we are being forced further and further toward hatred, not only of others, but of ourselves. This is exactly what the propaganda machine behind Hamas desires.
Hamas loves and glorifies death. Palestinians have been so brainwashed and brutalized that they welcome their own deaths and pray for the deaths of all Israelis. Just as al-Qadi describes, after he was captured, he was surrounded by Gazans celebrating Oct 7th, as if they had won. This is what it means for jihadists to win: to torture, humiliate and murder EVERYONE else. To leave not a single living soul unless they bow to Islam. It is a Holy War, fanaticism at its core. But not fanaticism the way we think about it, like a Swiftie who goes to every Taylor Swift concert, spending their last dime. We really need to rethink what it means to be a fanatic.
As al-Qadi explained, and what we know from other accounts, Gazans help Hamas with moving the hostages around, hiding them in large crowds of civilians, hiding them in homes. You do not see protests against Hamas in Gaza. You do not see Gazans demanding Hamas give the hostages back and end the war. Why not? Why is it all on Israel’s shoulders? Instead, they execute the hostages and tell Israel that if they try to rescue anyone else, this is what will happen. Any Gazan who might object will not speak out, since those who do so are tortured, imprisoned and killed. Not only them, but their entire families also suffer.
It is no great mystery where freedom lies, in Israel. Not Egypt, for example, a place I know very well, and certainly not in Gaza, under Hamas. Yet I get screamed at and accused of being a hate-filled racist for daring to say the truth. It’s very easy to prove. In Israel people take to the streets and protest and they are not imprisoned, tortured and killed for doing so. Now, the protests in favor of these monsters have returned to campuses in the West as the school year starts up again.
What is this telling Hamas? What is this telling the entire Islamic world? That we are fools who have lost any sense of identity, of what we stand for as Western nations. In Gaza, children are raised to be martyrs, and it isn’t just talk, they practice what they preach. This means they would kill any of those students wearing their keffiyeh scarves because beyond those scarves and the words they scream, they are infidels. Westerners do not practice what they preach, they do not follow Sharia Law. In all truth, they don’t have the stamina or the discipline. Islamic leaders must be laughing to see Americans bowing down willingly to the sword of Islam, without even putting up a fight. How they must despise our weakness.
Our very freedom is what Hamas uses against the West.
We take our freedom for granted. We have grown soft and lazy. We do not realize what it takes to fight against evil incarnate. That is what we are fighting against. Make no mistake.
We are so lost that we now have the most popular right-wing commentator, Tucker Carlson, calling pseudo-historian, Daryl Cooper “the most honest and important historian in America”, and giving him a platform to spout his subtle lies (I say subtle because so many people will defend him as not really saying what he is actually saying) to millions of Americans, that Winston Churchill was a psychopath and the worst villain of World War II, not Hitler. And I will be publishing a piece on that tomorrow.
Oddly, Darryl Cooper calls himself and his podcast “Martyr Made”. I realize now why martyrs have been so strongly on my mind, as I wrote about in In Defense of Faith. All the writing that I’ve done for the past two years about martyrs has led me to this point and it just gives me a firmer resolve to keep on going.
I was taught about martyrs as a child, but not the kind that Islam promotes. The martyrs that I knew and the martyrs that I was raised learning about from history, died for their Christian faith and when they died, they didn’t take as many innocent lives as they could along with them. They prayed for their tormentors. They loved those who hated them, just as Jesus loved his enemies.
Al-Qadi is a perfect example of the martyrs I knew, not the twisted demonic Hamas version. He was willing to die to save the lives of others.
To be a martyr in Islam is to commit jihad. It means that you kill yourself and, in the process, you kill as many infidels as possible. It means a teenager strapping a bomb to his body, boarding a bus and blowing everyone up. It means a mother rushing at an infidel mother and child and knifing them to death. It means mothers and fathers wishing for their children to grow up to be martyrs because this is the highest calling in Islam.
We do not understand this mentality. We value human life so we will do all we can to save one life. The problem is, saving that one life could mean further along the deaths of hundreds or even millions. How do moral people make such decisions? It can drive people mad. And we see this happening. We see how Israel is being divided against itself, as is the entire western civilization. Hamas knows this and they are using every psychological tactic to mess with our minds. How do you fight against an evil that does not value human life—at all? Do you have to become just like them? This is the horror; these are the monstrous questions that send people over the edge into a wasteland where they can no longer distinguish between right and wrong.
Look at how Yahya Sinwar’s life was saved by doctors in an Israeli prison, only to have him go on to orchestrate Oct 7th. The nephew of the doctor who saved Sinwar’s life was murdered on Oct 7th. How does a rational human being who has been raised to value human life; to believe they are doing the right thing even by saving the life of a monster like Sinwar, deal with something like that?
Hamas further demonstrated its commitment to the total destruction of Israel and the death of every Jew by appointing Sinwar as its new leader. If anything, Hamas will grow more brutal under Sinwar. We see it already with the execution of the 6 hostages and Israel being told that if they dare try to rescue anyone else, this is what will happen.
Hamas recently released this deeply disturbing propaganda video, 'Last Messages' from Israeli, American Hostages who have been Killed in Rafah’. The video features Eden Yerushalmi, a 24-year-old Israeli hostage who was killed alongside five others.
This was Eden before Oct 7th.
This was Eden in the video released by Hamas, days before her execution.
Eden’s body was recovered from Gaza along with five others after they were murdered a day or two before the army reached them. She appeared to have been starved and had lost 10 kilos in captivity, weighing only 36 kilos (79 lbs) when she was recovered.
The release of the video coincided with their funerals, resulting in intensified public outrage and protests in Israel over the government's handling of hostage negotiations.
Can you imagine the evil genius to plot the deaths of these innocent victims, shoot footage of them days before their execution, and then release the video the day of their funerals. The video is viewed as a psychological tactic aimed at the families of the victims and the Israeli public. Those tactics are working.
Although the video released by Hamas has been taken down, Eden Yerushalmi’s pleas for the release the hostages is still available. This is what people will see over and over. It is what will enrage them against Israel. You can see it here.
A major sticking point in a new cease fire is that Israel gives up a military presence at the Philadephi Corridor, the narrow strip of border lands between Gaza and Egypt. It would be madness for Israel to give up control of this area. This is where weapons of war are smuggled in.
It is as if Mexico had attacked the United States, taken hundreds of hostages, brutally tortured and killed others and then demanded, if we want our hostages back (the ones they hadn’t already killed) that we give up any type of control over the border with Mexico. And we would have to give over hundreds of drug lords that we had in prisons here.
This would be madness, and no American would ever accept it. And yet, if there were hundreds of hostages in Mexico, how would it be possible to make such a decision without losing a piece of our humanity? This is Hamas’s goal. To destroy our very souls.
In conclusion, just to recap the hostage situation:
Ninety-seven of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 33 confirmed dead by the IDF.
Hamas released 105 civilians during a weeklong truce in late November, and four hostages were released before that. Eight hostages have been rescued by troops alive, and the bodies of 37 hostages have also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the military as they tried to escape their captors.
Hamas is also holding two Israeli civilians who entered the Strip in 2014 and 2015, as well as the bodies of two IDF soldiers who were killed in 2014.
There is little for us to celebrate these days. Let’s celebrate real heroes like Farhan al-Qadi and refuse to be swayed by pseudo-historians like Darryl Cooper and the foolish enabler Tucker Carlson is increasingly proving himself to be.
I’ll stick with historians like Victor David Hanson. If you want a good history of World War II, I highly recommend: The Second World Wars with Victor Davis Hanson.
If you want to better understand how important the Philadephi Corridor is, please watch Yishai Fleisher’s video: Netanyahu Press Conference about the future of Gaza
Brilliant as always
Arabs in Israel proper live better, earn better, have more rights than in any other Arab country. Even those in the West Bank would be terrified living under PA rule.