If you’ve been following the news from Israel, you might have the impression that “violence” is killing a lot of people. As in this headline: “Palestinian Killed As Violence Continues.” Or this first paragraph: “Violence and bloodshed radiating outward from flash points in Jerusalem and the West Bank appear to be shifting gears and expanding, with Gaza increasingly drawn in.”
Read further, and you might also get a sense of who, according to Western media, is perpetrating “violence.” As in: “Two Palestinian Teenagers Shot by Israeli Police,” according to one headline. Or: “Israeli Retaliatory Strike in Gaza Kills Woman and Child, Palestinians Say,” according to another.
Such was the media’s way of describing two weeks of Palestinian assaults that began when Hamas killed a Jewish couple as they were driving with their four children in the northern West Bank. Two days later, a Palestinian teenager stabbed two Israelis to death in Jerusalem’s Old City, and also slashed a woman and a 2-year-old boy. Hours later, another knife-wielding Palestinian was shot and killed by Israeli police after he slashed a 15-year-old Israeli boy in the chest and back. [...]
Regarding the causes of this Palestinian blood fetish, Western news organizations have resorted to familiar tropes. Palestinians have despaired at the results of the peace process—never mind that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas just declared the Oslo Accords null and void. Israeli politicians want to allow Jews to pray atop the Temple Mount—never mind that Benjamin Netanyahu denies it and has barred Israeli politicians from visiting the site. There’s always the hoary “cycle of violence” formula that holds nobody and everybody accountable at one and the same time.
Left out of most of these stories is some sense of what Palestinian leaders have to say. As in these nuggets from a speech Mr. Abbas gave last month: “Al Aqsa Mosque is ours. They [Jews] have no right to defile it with their filthy feet.” And: “We bless every drop of blood spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah.”
Then there is the goading of the Muslim clergy. “Brothers, this is why we recall today what Allah did to the Jews,” one Gaza imam said Friday in a recorded address, translated by the invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute, or Memri. “Today, we realize why the Jews build walls. They do not do this to stop missiles but to prevent the slitting of their throats.”
Then, brandishing a six-inch knife, he added: “My brother in the West Bank: Stab!”
Imagine if a white minister in, say, South Carolina preached this way about African-Americans, knife and all: Would the news media be supine in reporting it? Would we get “both sides” journalism of the kind that is pro forma when it comes to Israelis and Palestinians, with lengthy pieces explaining—and implicitly justifying—the minister’s sundry grievances, his sense that his country has been stolen from him?
And would this be supplemented by the usual fake math of moral opprobrium, which is the stock-in-trade of reporters covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? In the Middle East version, a higher Palestinian death toll suggests greater Israeli culpability. (Perhaps Israeli paramedics should stop treating stabbing victims to help even the score.) In a U.S. version, should the higher incidence of black-on-white crime be cited to “balance” stories about white supremacists?
Didn’t think so.
Treatises have been written about the media’s mind-set when it comes to telling the story of Israel. We’ll leave that aside for now. The significant question is why so many Palestinians have been seized by their present blood lust—by a communal psychosis in which plunging knives into the necks of Jewish women, children, soldiers and civilians is seen as a religious and patriotic duty, a moral fulfillment. Despair at the state of the peace process, or the economy? Please. It’s time to stop furnishing Palestinians with the excuses they barely bother making for themselves.
Above all, it’s time to give hatred its due.[...]
Today in Israel, Palestinians are in the midst of a campaign to knife Jews to death, one at a time. This is psychotic. It is evil. To call it anything less is to serve as an apologist, and an accomplice.
Killing an Israeli is okay. Just don't kill a lion in Zimbabwe because then there will be hell to pay.
ReplyDeleteThat's all right. Just pay off the zimbabwean officials, and you'll get a clean bill of health.
ReplyDeleteMaybe we should pay off palestinian officials (and hamas, and others.) And next year others. Never ending cycle.
Israelis are stupid!!
ReplyDeleteThe difference in approach to war between the Palestinians-Arabs and the Israelis-Jews is that for the Arabs it's a "total war" against the Yahoods (it makes no difference to them what type of Jews), while for the Jews it's a "war of containment" or a "defensive war" such as hiding behind "walls" be it the old "Bar Lev Line" that the Egyptians-Arabs broke through in 1973, or the "separation wall" built to "keep out" Arab marauders but does nothing to control Israeli Arabs who sit right in the Knesset hurling their hate at the dumb Israelis who are "waiting" for the "Arab Mr. Nice Guys" to show up, but their ain't no such model, because right now the Arab and Muslim world is at full steam Jihad against ALL infidels, with Jews and Israelis heading their hit list.
The few times times that Israel switched to total war mode itself (usually only after great provocation and in extreme self-defense) such as in 1948, 1956, 1967, and after being bashed around in 1973, and then, as they say "when going gets tough, the tough get going" and Israel hit back and put both Cairo and Damascus under siege and could have taken those cities had they so wanted. But Jews are still suffering from the 2,000 year old inferiority complex of being suppressed by the nations of the world.
Just ask yourself what would the Maccabim have done? Or what would Dovid HaMelech have done, or Yehoshua, or even Rebbi Akiva? Under such circumstances, with your back to the wall, you do wait to have your throat slit but you hit back hard. Habo leharogcha, hargeihu techila...
Wake up Israel!
Suggestion, now that ISIS & Co is kicking out millions of people from Iraq and Syria and sending them to Europe, Israel should do the same and march anyone who acts with murderous intent, with their entire families and friends and march them across the Syrian border, give them a bottle of water and some pitta and tell them to find refuge in Syria. If the world complains, just say, look at what happens to "dissenters" in Syria and Iraq, if they are lucky they get to flee by the millions, otherwise they face beheadings, forced enslavement, forced conversions, starvation, torture...so please leave Israel alone, it is just sending away people who want to murder and maim and they will feel much more comfortable on the Syrian side of the border where Israel will send them.
Defeating the Jihadis requires a "winning" attitude.
ReplyDeleteListen to what British General Bernard Montgomery said when he assumed command of the British Army in North Africa that would defeat Germany's best General, Rommel, within a few months of taking command, at the Battle of El Alamein, the Allies first victory over the Nazis and their vaunted "Afrika Korps" during World War Two:
It took Montgomery about 30 seconds to convey his plan and the spirit needed to convey his faith in total victory over the Nazis in North Africa who wanted to invade Eretz Yisrael next:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zusl43tKmb4