Yahya Sinwar’s wife’s appearance in a Hamas tunnel with what seems to be an expensive designer bag says a great deal about the state of affairs of revolutionaries around the world.
With the demise of Yahya Sinwar, the IDF has released videos and pictures showing his life prior to and during the current war. In one video, Sinwar is seen taking his family and a big TV into his personal tunnel lair on the day before the attack on Israel on October 7th. There, soldiers found comfortable living conditions with multiple bathrooms and a kitchen. They also found millions of shekels and dollars nicely organized as if from a bank. They also found copious UNRWA supplies that Sinwar used for the comfort of his loved ones and bodyguards. Sinwar’s wife is seen at one point in a video smiling and holding what looks like a Hermes Birkin bag that retails for $32,000. Who knew that rat tunnels could be so stylish?
On the one hand, their place looks more appropriate for Dubai than a tunnel deep under Gaza. But the reality is that today’s “revolutionaries” are often multimillionaires or even billionaires. The three heads of Hamas, now reduced to two, lollygagging in a five star hotel in Qatar, are worth several billion dollars apiece. Stolen aid money, illegal activities, real estate portfolios—these are the foundations for multigenerational wealth of the leaders of an organization that claims to represent the poor and downtrodden Palestinian people. It was an open secret that Yasir Arafat was fabulously wealthy, and his wife lived with their daughter in Europe, where she spent oodles of money meant for new Palestinian hospitals and roads. Arafat himself lived a simple life and never personally gave off the impression that he had siphoned off huge sums for his and his senior advisors’ personal benefit. In this respect, Sinwar truly is a Palestinian leader: he gives the impression of being a man of the street while he lives like a king under the street.
There are many very wealthy people who do not try to give a false impression of being salt of the earth or being merely middle class. Donald Trump in his earlier iteration used to say, "I’m a really rich guy." It is documented that Trump has done a lot of good with his money, as has super wealthy Elon Musk. Besides his successful business ventures, Musk sees his wealth as a driver to make a better world. Michael Bloomberg invested $11 million of his own money into New York while he was mayor. He saw an opportunity to do good, and he had the resources to invest in the city he ran.
We’ll compare that behavior to wealthy folks on the left. John Edwards, it was revealed by one of his close aides during a trial related to monies spent on his love child, had a very interesting gimmick. He had a very expensive car, but when he went to his political rallies, he would drive an old beat up station wagon. Bernie Sanders bellows about the need for socialism but enjoys three houses, including one on a lake. The man of the people Barack Obama who supported policies like Obamacare that reduced choices for healthcare has homes in Oahu, Chicago, Washington and Martha's Vineyard. Democratic Socialist AOC went from a student-debt burdened bartender to a multimillionaire on a congresswoman’s salary. Those who scream loudest for open borders, higher minimum wages, socialist policies, and higher taxes for the wealthy often turn out to be extremely rich people like the fabulously wealthy fake-Indian Liz Warren. They talk big about the US becoming a socialist paradise with equity in place of equality and wealth distribution but live the lives of multimillionaire bigshots with private planes, big houses away from illegal immigrants and with not a financial concern in the world.
How do we understand these hyper-wealthy people who pretend to either be or care about the poor and downtrodden? How do we understand how Sinwar held mountains of Israeli 200 shekel bills (largest in circulation) while above him people did not have a place to live and had to fight over food aid? I think that much of the behavior can be attributed to fake guilt. How would you feel with a full stomach after an amazing 3 star Michelin meal coming face to face with a homeless person who has eaten one banana over the past three days? One can feel indifference. One can try to help. Or one can go on a guilt trip: how can I be so wealthy and well-off while this guy has nothing? Instead of doing like many wealthy people who have dedicated much of their lives and wealth to helping others, they go into play-acting mode: they pretend to identify with and care for the unfortunates while still enjoying all of the benefits of their wealth. Instead of admitting their wealth without apology and trying to figure out how to do good with it, they—like Arafat and Edwards—hide the wealth and act as if they care for their unfortunate comrades. I am sure that Frau Sinwar never showed that bag out on the streets of Gaza City. That would blow the cover her husband created of the simple revolutionary, dedicated to wiping out Jews and Israel. How could such a tireless warrior have time for shopping at Hermes?
I believe that this faux guilt in the West is the major driver for whites and corporations going crazy over DEI, equity, white fragility and all of the similar hokum. They have been cowed into feeling guilty for leveraging everything given to them and everything that they have accomplished so as to give tens of millions to the Marxist BLM movement or change acceptance rules at Harvard and elsewhere to accept unqualified candidates. It is a form of payment for sins: for being successful, we will give you money and a leg up, so that we can soothe our consciences over our successes and fortunes. The result, as with Hamas, is always disaster. It was a disaster for Israel for those killed on October 7th and since, and it has been a disaster for Hamas and the Palestinians as Gaza is being turned into a movie set for a new installment of Mad Max. Boeing and Harvard are not getting better by being DEI conformists.
Instead of feeling guilty about wealth and success, one should see everything as a gift from God with which to do good. One can use money to help others, and as we have seen in the recent hurricanes, companies can use their products and skill sets in order to help make people’s lives better. One does not have to hide or apologize for wealth; he needs to use it to do good. It is no surprise that all of Hamas’ leaders are fabulously wealthy. Their movement is based on a lie of the Jews being colonialists, and as such they feel comfortable stealing enormous amounts of unearned wealth for themselves while pretending to represent the people who are dirt poor.
Andrew Carnegie used his wealth to build over 2,500 libraries, nearly 1,700 of which are in the U.S. alone. George Soros has used his wealth to install district attorneys who are destroying the fabric of major cities by letting criminals go free. The money is the same. The question is what a wealthy person does with it.