Opinion: Where is the outrage over an American hostage’s death?

If you listen only to protesters at Columbia University, you might not know that an American citizen was brutally murdered by Hamas after spending 11 months in a captivity he earned by simply attending a concert last October.
More than just being held captive, he underwent what must have been horrific pain.
A video exists, apparently, of Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s capture, right after his left arm was shattered during the merciless attack by Hamas militants on Oct. 7. The Associated Press said it shows him with “a bloodied makeshift tourniquet around his left forearm with a stump of blood and bone protruding as he was forced into a pickup truck with other young Israeli men.”
So, where’s the outrage?
I’m not going to pretend I would know exactly what to do if I were president. Hostage situations have befuddled chief executives at least since Thomas Jefferson had to deal with Barbary states pirates who had captured American ships.
But I’m curious about what seems like a lack of interest among the public, except among those who blame Israel for all of this. Goldberg-Polin was one of eight Americans being held hostage. He was a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen, but an American nonetheless, from Virginia.
I’m trying to imagine what the response from ordinary Americans would have been if Iran had killed even one of the 53 hostages it took from the American embassy in Tehran in 1979. Or, to use a more recent example, what would have been the reaction if Russia had murdered Brittany Griner or Evan Gershkovich.
Again, I’m not speculating as to what the proper response would have been, but I’m sure regular folks would have been more exercised, perhaps even outraged.
I’m not trying to minimize the suffering of Palestinians since Oct. 7. The AP said more than 40,000 of them have died, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. How many of these were combatants is not known. But most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have had to flee their homes, and living conditions are brutal. Each story is a tragedy.
But this, too, illustrates the cold calculus of those who planned the Oct. 7 attack. A newly filed Justice Department complaint against top Hamas leaders outlines the details of that attack. About 1,200 people were murdered and 250 were taken hostage. Militants used “trucks, motorcycles, bulldozers, speedboats, and paragliders,” and the violence included rape, genital mutilation and close-range executions with machine guns.
As Bret Stephens of The New York Times said, Hamas launched the attack “knowing that it would provoke the most furious Israeli response possible.” That is, a response against Hamas that would end up killing a lot of Palestinians.
It no doubt killed the hostages last weekend knowing that would further divide the Israeli state without leading to many real consequences, or even outrage. Hostages normally are held as leverage for some sort of advantage.
Hamas is an organization, by the way, that Palestinian rights activist Bassem Eid said in a Newsweek op-ed violates the rights of women and persecutes LGTBQ+ people. A former hostage and a United Nations report have described how hostages are being sexually abused.
These sound like things worthy of protest by an enlightened crowd, or at least a measure of outrage.
In a statement about the death of Goldberg-Polin, President Joe Biden said, “Make no mistake, Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes.”
The seven-count criminal complaint his Justice Department filed against top Hamas leadership hardly counts as paying for the crimes. It was actually filed in February but has only now been unsealed.
However, it is worth noting that the complaint singles out Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. As The Associated Press reported a month ago, “Sinwar was released from prison in 2011 by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as part of an exchange for an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in a cross-border raid.”
It sounds like hostage-taking pays off, which brings us back to the difficulty of countering such a thing.
The Wall Street Journal said Goldberg-Polin’s death, and the remaining seven Americans who are being held, has put more pressure on the Biden administration to push for a cease-fire, or a hostage-prisoner exchange.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said his office is investigating Goldberg-Polin’s death as an act of terrorism.
The Biden administration, meanwhile, is critical of Israeli leadership. Other countries are applying pressure, as well. And yet, despite all this, an official with Biden’s National Security Council expressed optimism that a deal could be brokered.
The question is, what would come after that if Hamas knows it can act free from outrage in the United States?