It's Wednesday, February 14, 2024.

I'm Albert Moeller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

Israeli celebrated the rescue of two of the hostages that have been held for weeks by Hamas

in an effort undertaken by the IDF the Israeli Defense Forces and there were

other units that were involved in the rescue but it was a spectacular success and

the liberation of two hostages is certainly something to celebrate.

An older man and a younger man.

And what we now know is that even as this effort was undertaken, it was up against spectacular odds.

It was a remarkable military achievement to rescue these two hostages.

All this serves to underline the fact that Hamas not only murdered about 1,200 persons

in October 7 raid on Israel, the terrorist group also took hostages.

Now let's just think about the morality of that for a moment. And so you can look at this and you understand that you have murder on the one hand in this terrorist attack, but you also have hostage taking. But here's where in the moral equation of terrorism you're

looking at homicide and hostage taking as two essential tools in the toolkit.

That tells you just how evil all of this really is.

And the taking of hostages amounts to an effort to gain leverage.

And that's exactly how Hamas, following the example of others, has treated the hostage equation.

Now, Israel, as a culture and as a government successively, as different governments have been in control,

Israel has also fed the problem by a willingness

to pay an extraordinary price to liberate hostages.

And so you might say, well that just would be the normal national procedure just about anywhere,

but that is actually not the posture of the United States of America.

The United States government and our military will go to extreme links to try to rescue hostages but not at the risk of

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