Tea at Trianon: Ensuring the Israeli Hostages in Gaza Are Not Forgotten

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, July 27, 2025

Ensuring the Israeli Hostages in Gaza Are Not Forgotten

From It Can Always Get Worse:

Last night, JNF UK organised a screening of the new documentary, Home: Omer Shem Tov Speaks, at a north London synagogue. Omer was abducted by HAMAS during the 7 October 2023 pogrom, and finally released after 505 days, on 22 February 2025. After the film, there was a question-and-answer with Omer and the director, Yoram Zak.
Omer, days short of his twenty-first birthday, was at the Nova music festival when he was kidnapped along with his sister, Maya Regev, and his younger brother, Itay. A young man they had met at the concert had driven some to safety then drove back for Omer and his siblings, but their car was stopped by HAMAS. The driver was subsequently murdered in captivity. Both Itay and Maya were shot, and Omer was severely beaten, then forced to the ground in front of a truck; he was sure the terrorists were going to kill him by driving it over his head. Thankfully, that did not happen, and Omer’s siblings were released during the first ceasefire in November 2023. The tortures of HAMAS’s “doctors” left Maya with injuries that multiple surgeries have tried to correct.
After being displayed to a euphoric Gazan crowd, Omer was initially kept with Itay in an above-ground apartment. Once Itay was released, Omer was taken into the tunnels, and placed in a tiny cage with no light—where the darkness was so total there were “no shadows”, as he puts it. (The film is in Hebrew with English subtitles.) Omer immediately had an asthma attack. HAMAS eventually found him an inhaler. The attempts of Omer’s parents to get his inhaler to him through the Red Cross went nowhere as the “humanitarian” organisations have not been allowed access to the Israeli hostages, and have not made it a major part of their public advocacy to try to change this situation.
In the documentary, Zak recreates the image of this confinement such that Omer seems to be telling his story from within the underground cell. Given a torch with enough battery for two or three hours per day, Omer tried to save this meagre light for mealtimes. Initially, Omer was given two pittas per day and some salty water. This was steadily reduced down to half a pitta, and then he was on one biscuit per day and some salty water. He made efforts to protract the process: waiting two or three hours before having half the biscuit, then again for the other half.
To pass the time, Omer tried to sleep as much as possible. A lot of his conscious time was spent talking to God. Omer was not really praying for release: he explains a realisation that people approach Hashem with requests, but nobody every asks how He is, so Omer chose to start that way, and then offered thanks for being alive, for the food he did have. If Omer did get to asks, it was for strength and guidance, and for his family.
After fifty days, Omer was moved to a slightly bigger cell, with some light and orange walls, again recreated in the film. Omer was allowed to shower for the first time. The dirt on his body was so thick by then it could be scraped off. He was given something like an actual meal and devoured it. The HAMAS terrorists stood by insulting him as a “Jewish pig”. Understandably, he was not bothered at that stage: he had become “very skinny”, his bones visible. An interrogation had been planned for the next day but never took place because the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) had appeared above the tunnel and this distracted his captors. (Read more.)