HOWARD TULLMAN JOINS LISA DENT ON WGN RADIO TO DISCUSS RAHM'S FUTURE PLANS

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE 

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

ASHAMED OF TRUMP

 

PUTIN'S PUSSY

 

MORE SICK MESS FROM PRESIDENT MUSK

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Time to Ask Some Tough Questions About AI 

Has there ever been as much hype about a product that has yet to prove its value for most businesses? That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take a hard look at what AI might do for you. 

 

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1

MAR 4, 2025

You just might need AI to help you list all of the issues and concerns that surround AI today.  

One of the most persistent worries in the business community is whether any of the various large language models (LLMs) are really ready for prime time and for widespread adoption by companies looking to incorporate these new technologies into their day-to-day operations.

Even if you are willing to put aside all of the commentary about hallucinations and false references, and the circularity problems raised by these systems blindly ingesting the garbage already being generated by other AI systems and thereby diluting the value and accuracy of their own outputs, you still reach the fundamental question of which version of the “truth” your own people can rely upon. Or even choosing among competing offerings that are now creating and delivering inconsistent and conflicting results.

It’s a very tough choice for the IT department to decide which LLM, if any, to endorse and adopt at this point. While a segregated sandbox to be experimented with wouldn’t cost a bundle (apart from the overhead and personnel time), once any firm tried to incorporate these systems into their own workflow at the enterprise level and install it in hundreds of seats, you’d be talking about a few hundred thousand dollars.

I guess that if you don’t care where you end up, and you’ve got money to burn and want to tell your board that you’re doing something, any road will get you there.

A free consumer offering and a novelty accessed by millions of curious users is one thing. People will try anything for nothing, especially folks with plenty of time on their hands and nothing to lose. But this is not a sustainable solution for serious operators on either side of the equation and – as we have already seen – it’s also not a remotely profitable model for the primary providers, since they lose money on every inquiry.

Why They’re Trying to Get Everyone Hooked on AI

All the big guys are racing to create a viable AI assistant for the little people in the hopes (as has happened in the past) that adoption from the outside in (remember all the ad world creatives using Macs) will eventually dictate which larger solution a given business will adopt. If your people all love Perplexity, you don’t really want to start swimming upstream and pushing some other choice.

The civilian population is already reaching the point of confusion and fatigue because there are at least half a dozen major offerings in the market with more variations and versions coming every day. ChatGPT presently towers above the rest with more than 350 million monthly active users.

But Microsoft, Google, and DeepSeek are already reaching some reasonable levels of scale and it’s never smart to bet against fast followers when they are as deeply entrenched and well-funded as these guys are. Watching Microsoft Teams slowly eat Slack’s lunch is a good indicator of where these things often end up.

Microsoft’s decision to shut down Skype and put the functionality into the Teams package is another good indicator of the old tech rule that winners take all. Remember that Microsoft itself spent $8.5 billion in 2011 to buy Skype to replace its own mediocre video offering.

The AI Race Is Still Wide Open

No one is there yet in the AI race. The main riddle is to make the assistant contextually savvy, and surprisingly Amazon is a player in this race because of Alexa. With more than 600 million Alexa-enabled devices, the world is already comfortable asking Alexa for help. And with new tech, familiarity builds acceptance and comfort rather than contempt. It’s still a “go with what you know” world.

All the major players aspire and claim to be delivering the most accurate and comprehensive responses to carefully crafted prompts. In fact, the demand for prompt architects and prompt engineering  has exploded as it becomes clear that even the best answer is useless if you’re asking the wrong questions.

We’re also seeing a surge in new businesses aiming to deliver industry-specific AI tools like GPT-4o for Law and also startups that offer to help companies build their own small and custom models based on their own proprietary data.  The idea is to avoid the generic overkill and costs of the major LLMs. You don’t have to boil the ocean and burn big bucks every time you need some straightforward answers about your own business and customers.

One other interesting new startup, Avatar Buddy,  builds low-cost, task- and role-specific “buddies” for sales and support people, as well as experts and digital twins for educators, which provide real-time assistance and direction to folks in the field.

But all these conversations tend to return to the core issue, which is: How is a buyer supposed to evaluate and decide between these many alternative tools when even extensive, comparative tests are inconclusive or contradictory? There’s very little credible guidance so far; the players keep updating their solutions and moving the measurement goal posts.

Which means that for the foreseeable future, if you want to hold your nose and jump into the pool, you’re probably best advised to follow Yogi Berra’s classic advice: When you come to the fork in the road, take it.     

CRAZY KENNEDY MEASLES

 

GLASSER - Why Aren’t We in the Streets?

 Why Aren’t We in the Streets?

On Trump the Almighty and his so-far quiescent capital.

 

By Susan B. Glasser

February 27, 2025

Last Friday night, minutes after President Donald Trump announced the firing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and a purge of the military’s top lawyers, I received an e-mail from my cousin in Los Angeles. “Why are we not in the streets?” she wrote. “The Germans even marched against Musk. The French would have barricaded every government building.” All week long I’ve been thinking of that message, composed in the heat of the moment after an unprecedented event that already seems forgotten amid all the subsequent unprecedented events.

In the days since then, Trump warned agency heads to prepare for “large-scale” layoffs by mid-March, fired thousands of additional government employees, and ordered Elon Musk, deputized as his chief job-slasher, to “GET MORE AGGRESSIVE.” He’s axed bird-flu inspectors in the midst of a bird-flu outbreak and got rid of thousands of Internal Revenue Service personnel at the height of tax season. On Monday, the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Trump ordered the U.S. to stand not with Ukraine but instead with Russia, in a U.N. vote that put America on the side of dictatorships and against most of our democratic allies—a profound shift in American foreign policy. On Tuesday, Trump’s White House abolished a century-old tradition by decreeing that only news organizations handpicked by the President’s staff would be allowed in the press pool. On Wednesday, at the first Cabinet meeting of his second term, Trump allowed Musk to hold forth before any Senate-confirmed members of the actual Cabinet. (“Is anybody unhappy with Elon?” he asked. “If you are, we’ll throw him out of here.”) On Thursday, Trump vowed to impose stringent twenty-five-per-cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico next week, as well as additional levies on Chinese goods—which, if he follows through, are likely to result in higher prices for American consumers already concerned about inflation.

And yet, making my way around Washington this week, the city showed no signs of the Trumpian tumult. Disruption, apparently, is just our new normal. There were no major protests in the quiescent capital, unless one counts the lawsuits against Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” that have been piling up in federal court, or the small crowd that gathered on Thursday outside of U.S.A.I.D.’s now shuttered headquarters with hand-lettered thank-you signs for the thousands of workers who were given fifteen minutes to clean out their desks. These acts were a far cry from the popular uprisings that presumably would have convulsed Paris or any other European city if the President of the republic suddenly and unilaterally reoriented the nation’s geopolitical strategy, turned on its major trading partners, and allowed the world’s richest man to cut hundreds of thousands of federal workers and billions of dollars in government services.

Instead, the opposition was receiving this counsel from James Carville in the Times: “Roll over and play dead.” (His actual words.)

Maybe the legendary strategist will once again prove his political genius with his advice to Democrats to do nothing and simply wait for Trump to screw everything up before, eventually, descending “like a pack of hyenas” and going for his “jugular.” In the meantime, however, Carville’s call for “strategic political retreat” sure seems like something a lot closer to unilateral disarmament. What’s the point of having two political parties in our democracy if one of them is no longer loyal to the Constitution and the other one is so weak and consumed by infighting that its response is to say, Never mind, we can’t get our act together. Sorry that Trump is ruining the country but we’ll be back next year in time for the midterms?

Mindful of this argument, I took a scroll through the social-media feed of the House’s Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, which contained not a single mention in recent days of either Musk or Trump, and for the most part simply restated talking points against the proposed Republican budget resolution that passed this week in a 217-215 vote. (Over in the Senate, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer at least had a lot more to say on X about Trump and the “billionaires’ club” and the “chaos” across the land.) Civil society, too, has been remarkably muted in its response. After Trump’s White House seized control of the press pool, there was no boycott or organized resistance and not much more than expressions of Susan Collins-esque deep concern; rival journalists quickly accepted the press pool access that was stripped from their politically noncompliant colleagues.

Carville’s case for doing nothing, incidentally, is not merely some provocative outlier. I’ve heard many Democrats make versions of it privately since Trump’s victory in November. One friend joked that they should treat Trump’s attack on Washington like Napoleon’s march on Moscow, drawing the President and his party into an unwinnable fight. (Though, to be fair, the Russians had to burn down their own ancient capital before defeating the French invaders.) Like Carville, many justify their choice to do nothing with the argument that the “resistance” to Trump failed during his first term—a bizarre act of rewriting history that I have a hard time understanding. Did they forget how Democrats took back control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms? Or that many of Trump’s own first-term appointees successfully resisted from within, preventing him from following through on his most disruptive ideas for slashing the American government, attacking the rule of law, and reorienting our foreign policy, many of which he is now acting on? Did they forget that Trump was defeated in 2020 in an election that ended with Democrats in control of not only the White House but both houses of Congress?

There’s also a partisan cynicism embedded in this calculation—that Trump’s second term isn’t really the fascist threat that Democrats warned about on the campaign trail but a regrettable interlude that must be waited out. Talk about a risky assumption, one that seems premised on the idea that the damage from Trump 2.0 can be undone in four years just as quickly as it’s being done.

Is this really the week to make that case?

There is no doubt that Trump is power-tripping like never before. And why shouldn’t he? It’s not just Democrats walking off the field. Republicans are offering him a level of adulation that would make Kim Jong Un blush. In the House, his party members are competing with one another to turn sycophancy into law, proposing everything from a Trump-branded airport to a Trump-themed federal holiday, according to the Wall Street Journal. At Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting, the session opened with a prayer from his new Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Scott Turner. “Thank you, God,” he said, “for President Trump.” In a White House photo op this week, Trump posed with a red baseball hat emblazoned with the slogan “Trump Was Right About Everything!” (I received a fund-raising e-mail from Trump on Thursday, selling the hats for forty-seven dollars.)

Trump’s recent rage at Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, publicly pushing back on him for “living in a disinformation space” was telling: Trump views himself as the President Almighty, as one foreign diplomat recently put it to me—no challenges are welcome. At such a moment, I understand the theory of the case: let him dig his hole and bury himself in it.

But my fear is a different one. In just five weeks in office, Trump has asserted sweeping authorities and consolidated control over the executive branch by appointing what is undoubtedly the most extreme Cabinet in American history. What we don’t know yet is exactly how far he plans to go, now that so little apparently stands in his way. Will he follow through on his past threats to investigate and imprison political enemies? Or to use the American military to crack down on political dissent at home, given that he’s fired top generals and wants to replace them with others willing to profess loyalty to him personally? I don’t know, but I do know this: the man who calls himself our King is more than delighted for his enemies to wallow offstage in their own weakness. Nature, and Trump, abhor a vacuum. ♦

HOWARD TULLMAN JOINS LISA DENT ON WGN RADIO TO DISCUSS STARBUCKS

 LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

MAGAt Cure

 

INDIFFERENCE IS WORSE THAN HATE

 

OPINION: Indifference is worse than hate

If Jewish dignity is negotiable, 'never again' becomes a devastating lie, writes Hen Mazzig

By Hen Mazzig February 23, 2025, 11:52 am

 

There are moments in human history when evil announces itself so clearly, so vividly, that silence becomes impossible. Or so one might think.

On February 22, 2025, Hamas released six Israeli hostages, among them Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed—two mentally disturbed men who had spent a decade in captivity. But this was no act of mercy; it was theatre of the grotesque, designed specifically to humiliate. The hostages were marched through jeering crowds, including children, their dignity systematically dismantled for propaganda. These images—captured, circulated, consumed—were eerily reminiscent of darker moments from humanity’s recent past, a stark reminder that hatred still thrives, particularly against Jews.

Just days before this spectacle, Hamas had committed an atrocity even more appalling. Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir, were returned to their homeland—but not alive. Instead, they arrived in locked coffins, without keys, deliberately sealed to maximize anguish. Their bodies bore the unmistakable marks of brutality, killed not by the impersonal distance of a bullet, but by terrorists’ own hands. And when Hamas initially sent the wrong body instead of Shiri’s, it was not incompetence—it was cruelty layered upon cruelty, a final mockery of dignity itself.

Then came last night, when Hamas escalated their dark theater further, releasing a video featuring two young hostages, Evitar David and Guy Gilboa-Dalal, both only 23. They were paraded at the hostage-release ceremony solely to torment them. The Red Cross representatives, standing just feet away, said nothing, did nothing, choosing instead silent complicity in the face of inhumanity.

 

And yet, perhaps the most troubling part of this tragedy isn’t only Hamas’s brutality; it’s the global silence that has followed. While millions around the world passionately marched against military operations in Rafah, chanting “All Eyes on Rafah,” there was barely a murmur of outrage for Shiri, Ariel, Kfir, Evitar, or Guy. This absence of empathy is not an oversight—it’s evidence of a chilling truth: atrocities against Jews have somehow become normalized, easier to ignore, dismiss, or rationalise.

Consider Avera Mengistu’s story—3,821 days spent in isolation, each one an eternity of deprivation and humiliation. Here was a man struggling with mental illness, stripped of dignity, paraded like a trophy. Or Omer Shem Tov, another hostage released, forced at gunpoint to kiss the heads of his captors—an image meticulously designed to degrade, to diminish. Each humiliating photograph, each viral video released by Hamas, quietly erodes the world’s capacity for outrage, gradually numbing the collective conscience until violence becomes routine.

But this cruelty is not random. It is calculated, precise. Hamas understands the power of desensitisation. They know that every unanswered atrocity shifts humanity’s moral baseline downward, normalizing barbarism.

The silence of the world in response is not neutrality—it is complicity. When atrocities against Jews elicit only passive indifference, they encourage more brutality. When protests erupt worldwide over justified military actions, yet remain silent about slaughtered children, it creates an unmistakable double standard, one that implicitly declares Jewish lives less worthy of global empathy.

“Never Again”—a solemn vow forged from the ashes of the Holocaust—once seemed immutable. Yet, as atrocities against Jews grow more grotesque and are met only with deafening silence, one wonders if “Never Again” was ever more than mere words, comforting yet hollow, easily forgotten when the victims become inconvenient.

We cannot allow humanity’s moral compass to be reset in the face of such brutality.

Silence is complicity; indifference is enabling. As Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel famously said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”

We owe it to Avera Mengistu, to Shiri Bibas, to Ariel and Kfir, to Evitar David and Guy Gilboa-Dalal—to every victim of this unimaginable cruelty—to speak loudly, clearly, and urgently.

Because if Jewish dignity is negotiable, if atrocities reminiscent of our darkest past provoke no global outrage, then “Never Again” isn’t just a broken promise—it’s a devastating lie.

 

DO-NOTHING DEMS ARE WORTHLESS AND HELPING TRUMP KILL OUR COUNTRY - MAGAts AREN'T ANY BETTER

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Please Don’t Make the Starbucks Mistake 

By trying to please everyone—including freeloaders—the coffee company ultimately began alienating the paying customers. 

 

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1

FEB 25, 2025

Trying to please everyone, or be all things to all people, has never been a successful strategy for business, or for just about anyone other than certain politicians who are adept at smoothly lying to whichever segment of voters they happen to be addressing, and promising them precisely what they want to hear. Millions of them would rather remain deluded than learn the often-harsh truth and be forced to face the painful realities of their lives and their future prospects.

Trump has not only made lying into an art form, but he’s also gotten away with virtually everything. Crime evidently pays when the frauds and thefts are grand enough. And the grifting and graft is regularly celebrated and excused by millions of MAGAts, sycophants, enablers, and venal politicians looking out for their own hides.

Every day we’re also seeing the living embodiment of the “don’t ask for permission, ask for forgiveness” doctrine from a shameless scoundrel. And here again, MAGAts and right-wing media applaud his willfulness and reckless disregard for the law—at least until they slowly realize that their own oxen are being gored, their businesses are imperiled, and their own parents and kids are being screwed.

Setting the Wrong Example00:0001:42

In all of this chaos and lawlessness, there couldn’t be a worse set of messages for our upcoming entrepreneurs, who are young, naive, and painfully short of memory. The days of the Theranos prosecution and the foolishness and dangers of the “fake it until you make it” attitude are long gone and largely forgotten. So, the temptation to say anything, eagerly overpromise, run blindly full speed ahead, and pray for the best is quite seductive regardless of the size of your business or the years that you’ve been at it.

A current case in point is Starbucks, which is in the midst of its third or fourth massive turnaround — including a layoff of 1,100 corporate employees — and can’t seem to make up its mind about what it really wants to be. As a result, the company is spread a mile wide and an inch deep across 40,000 locations and providing little or no coherent guidance, direction, or vision to stores, licensees, or customers. Nor has this flawed wayfinding been helped by having four CEOs since the pandemic, in addition to periodic visits from Howard Schutz, Starbucks’s creator, visionary, and former CEO/chairman, who lingered too long.

His masterstroke of woke foolishness — in 2018, after an embarrassing and racially charged scene in a Philadelphia store went viral — was to remark that he didn’t want nonpaying customers who were being turned away from using the stores’ bathrooms to “feel less than,” or presumably to have their feelings hurt. Attempting to put that confusing and inconsistent sentiment into a policy or procedural manual to make everyone happy was a fool’s errand.

After years of inviting the world into its shops and truly turning many locations into pre-pandemic offices, the company motto could just as well have been, “Stay for the day without having to pay.” The growing problem was that underlying this welcoming approach was also a policy that asked nonpaying customers, after some modest amount of time, to leave. In addition, it became increasingly clear that the volume and behavior of the freeloaders was discouraging paying customers. The fantasy of openness was a nice sentiment, but the facts on the ground were becoming harder and harder to manage.  

Why Starbucks Is Making a Belated Backtrack

Starbucks has now officially reversed its open-door policy and will focus, appropriately, on paying customers, which makes a ton of business sense. An extensive new code of conduct has been published that warns that violators will be asked to leave and that the cops may be called if necessary. The goal is to make expected behaviors clear for all and to thereby create a better environment for everyone.

But as you might imagine, because the company is still a (struggling) business and not a public service, Starbucks’s new CEO is trying to have his cake and coffee, too. The result is more corporate doublespeak, which is unlikely to do anything beyond compounding the confusion and dumping the onus of interpretation, and enforcement, on the baristas. The new CEO, Brian Niccol, recently told investors that he wants to make the stores “feel like welcoming coffeehouses” and “community centers” without mentioning that everyone entering would be expected to buy a cup of joe or a latté. If this strikes you as a pot full of the same old and tired porridge, you wouldn’t be far off.

At some point, Starbucks needs to admit that the company seeks a certain kind of customer and a certain level of spend that simply cannot include all comers. You can’t please everyone, you can’t serve everyone, and you can’t fool anyone with a story that makes no sense. The unfortunate thing is that senior management has pushed the problem downstream to the frontline troops who are the least prepared and able to police the properties while at the same time trying to serve the paying customers. Things are bad enough that they are constantly navigating the minefield between in-store buyers and mobile customers—all of whom feel at one time or another like second-class citizens.   

There’s clearly no good or simple solution, although removing the bulk of the seating at many stores and converting them into basically drive-up and pick-up shops seems to be working. How?  By better setting and managing the customers’ expectations. But the best and most realistic answer is to bite the bullet and tell the truth: You can’t be all things to all people.

 

HAMAS MONSTERS

 

Hamas’s Theater of the Macabre

The terrorist group has dragooned its hostages, Jewish and not, into perverse performance art.

By Yair Rosenberg

 

February 25, 2025, 7 AM ET

At first, Thursday’s festivities in Gaza seemed like just another sordid spectacle in a 16-month exhibition of debasement. In front of a raucous crowd, Hamas gunmen displayed coffins containing the remains of four Israelis: an octagenarian peace activist named Oded Lifshitz, child hostages Ariel and Kfir Bibas—ages 4 years and nine months, respectively, when kidnapped—and their mother, Shiri. A label affixed to the latter’s coffin declared that she had been “arrested” on October 7, presumably for the crime of existing while Jewish. All four corpses were handed over to the Red Cross for transfer to Israel as part of the ongoing cease-fire deal.

Then Israeli coroners concluded that the two children had been murdered by their captors and that the woman’s body wasn’t their mother’s after all. A moment of particularly acute horror briefly broke through the headlines that have been dominated by President Donald Trump’s turn on Ukraine. “I condemn the parading of bodies and displaying of the coffins of the deceased Israeli hostages by Hamas on Thursday,” declared United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, an otherwise relentless critic of Israel. “Any handover of the remains of the deceased must comply with the prohibition of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.”

Read: What Hamas wants

The truth is, body switching might be new to this conflict, but macabre theatrics are not. Since the day Hamas invaded southern Israel and used GoPro cameras and phones to document its massacres—including uploading the execution of a grandmother to her Facebook page—the group has been staging a show for the world to see. Dressing its sadism in the flimsy disguise of Palestinian nationalism—a ruse that has seemingly fooled more Western college students than residents of Gaza—Hamas has attempted to win a perverse propaganda war even as it has lost the actual war in lopsided fashion, to the horrific devastation of Gaza’s civilian population.

Some of these efforts are only now coming to light. In January, the 20-year-old soldier Daniella Gilboa was released from captivity in one of the first exchanges under the current cease-fire deal. She revealed that she had been forced by her Hamas jailers to stage her own demise. “Today we are filming you dead,” one reportedly told her, compelling her to pose in powder and debris as though she’d been killed in an Israeli air strike. Hamas subsequently released a blurry image that it claimed was of a female hostage blown up by Israel. The woman had Gilboa’s tattoo. Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another terror group that joined Hamas in its October 7 assault, similarly falsely claimed that the 76-year-old hostage Hanna Katzir had died, only to release her in a November 2023 exchange.

The Bibas debacle had no such bittersweet ending. On Friday, Hamas quietly handed over another body that was identified as actually belonging to Shiri Bibas, claiming it was just a “mix-up.” This may well be true: Shiri and her children were taken captive on October 7 by the Mujahideen Brigades, a small armed group that presumably retained custody of their bodies. When the trio turned up dead, Hamas might have had little notion of exactly what happened to them. Of course, this did not stop the group from claiming, without evidence, that Israel had killed the three hostages in an air strike, as though this would somehow make the people responsible for the deaths of the snatched children someone other than the child-snatchers. As it turned out, Hamas didn’t even have the right bodies, let alone any insight into their manner of death, and was seemingly piling deception upon its depravity.

         THESE PIGS ARE INSANE FANATICS

With the establishment of an unstable cease-fire last month, the Hamas show has taken to broadcasting scenes of public humiliation of Israeli hostages to the world via Al Jazeera and social media. Eli Sharabi, 52, was compelled to speak at his release about how he looked forward to reuniting with his wife and daughters—his captors knew, but didn’t tell him, that they had been murdered on October 7. Sharabi was released alongside two other hostages in emaciated condition, flanked by obviously well-fed Hamas gunmen.

Yarden Bibas, husband of Shiri and father of the slain boys, was forced to wave limply to an assembled crowd at his February 1 release, even as Hamas kept the fate and bodies of his family from him. And on Saturday, just two days after the bizarre Bibas body swap, 22-year-old Omer Shem Tov was instructed by a masked cameraman to kiss his captors onstage, resulting in a viral social-media clip. Getty distributed a photo from this stunt that multiple media outlets republished without caveat or disclosure. Finally, Hamas brought two unreleased hostages to Saturday’s ceremony, made them watch as their countrymen were freed, and then released a propaganda clip of them begging for their own lives.

Graeme Wood: A record of pure, predatory sadism

But perhaps most chilling was the release of a hostage Hamas chose not to humiliate. For nearly 10 years, the group has imprisoned Hisham al-Sayed, a mentally ill Muslim Bedouin Israeli civilian who wandered into Gaza. As part of Saturday’s exchange, the terrorist group quietly released him without fanfare to the Red Cross, transferring the 37-year-old back to Israel sans ceremony or jeering crowds. It quickly became clear why. After reuniting with his son, al-Sayed’s father, Sha’aban, gave a devastating account to the press about his condition.

“He is broken,” the elder al-Sayed said. “He says a lot of incomprehensible things. He speaks in a whisper, maybe out of fear. I believe he is in a state of mental torture.” Hamas officials had previously told Al Jazeera that the group had handed over al-Sayed without the usual hoopla out of respect for the Arabs of Israel. “Hamas are liars,” retorted the father. “They didn’t want people to see what state he was in, and that’s why there was no ceremony. If they had any respect for people, they would have released him a long time ago.”

Hamas’s hostage propaganda is blunt and transparently self-serving. And like all theatrical performances, it requires a certain suspension of disbelief. Unlike most, however, it also requires a suspension of belief in humanity.