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The real nature of the “Arab-Israeli conflict”-a genocidal assault by Arabs and other Muslims on a peace-loving democracy-was on horrific display Thursday evening when a Palestinian entered a Jerusalem yeshiva and shot to death eight young men while wounding nine others before being shot to death himself. The nature of Gazan society was also on horrific display; that same eveningGaza’s streets filled with joyous crowds of thousands…. In mosques in Gaza City and northern Gaza, many residents went to perform the prayers of thanksgiving. Armed men fired in the air in celebration and others passed out sweets to passersby.
Hamas stated that it “blesses the operation. It will not be the last.”Islamic Jihad, also Gaza-based, came out with “We welcome this heroic act and strengthen the hands of those who carried it out.”Meanwhile on the West Bank, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas was strangely credited for “condemning” the attack when he seems only to have released a statement that he “condemns all attacks that target civilians, whether they are Palestinians or Israelis.” Abbas’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades was more forthcoming in a statement released Sunday in Ramallah that expressed full support for what it too called a “heroic” attack.Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, official newspaper of the PA, was similarly forthcoming: it featured a front-page photo of the dead terrorist over a caption calling him a shahid (martyr).But if Abbas, favorite of Condi Rice and the Bush administration and “peace partner” of the Olmert government, felt the need to release a relatively abstract, toned-down statement, no such restraint was shown by Gazan leaders and certainly not by the populace. But the fact that Gaza or “Hamastan” is an ignorant society deeply inculcated with hatred did not stop New York Times reporter Steven Erlanger from going there last week to find some anti-Israeli scoops.In a report filed also on Thursday before the Jerusalem attack, Erlanger referred to the “48-hour Israeli military incursion” days earlier, “which killed nearly 100 Palestinians,” and said “residents here were horrified by the numbers of civilians they believed had died….”Though he must have known about previous Gazan celebrations after deliberate massacres of Israelis, Erlanger didn’t bother to ask these residents if this was an across-the-board “horror” about civilian death or a rather selective one. Instead the best he could manage was this sop to “even-handedness”: “Arguments persist over how many of the dead were truly uninvolved civilians, with Palestinian officials saying half or more than half, and Israel saying far less than half.” It went without saying that for Erlanger, the word of Palestinian—meaning Hamas—officials had equal weight with Israel’s; the Times and other liberal media never giving Israel even a slight nod as a parliamentary democracy compared to the terrorist organizations that attack it.But Erlanger’s aims went beyond putting Israel on the same moral plane as Hamas and the society it has helped mold. He quotes one Mirvat Abu Shbak, wife of a Fatah general who fled Gaza after Hamas assassination attempts: “We were sleeping at midnight when there was a lot of shooting.... An Israeli sniper took a position in the house next door, and he could see me, and me him.”The Israeli sniper, according to Mirvat Abu Shbak, goes on to kill two of her teenage children in cold blood—rather like the Israeli soldiers who, in Gaza back in 2000, were almost universally believed to have killed the child Muhammad al-Dura just for the hell of it, in what was eventually exposed as a fraud and a libel.But Erlanger has no tough questions for his interviewee because he’s found something too valuable: an Abu Ghraib, “proof” that it’s the Western—i.e., American or Israeli—forces who are brutal and cruel and that, as in the worldview of liberal Times readers, one shouldn’t defend oneself against terror because it just kills people, makes them angry, and makes you a criminal.
Indeed, Erlanger quotes Gazans supporting “resistance” to Israel without asking what the term could mean now that Israel has left Gaza and what it is that the rockets raining on civilians in sovereign Israeli territory are “resisting.”...
Indeed, Erlanger quotes Gazans supporting “resistance” to Israel without asking what the term could mean now that Israel has left Gaza and what it is that the rockets raining on civilians in sovereign Israeli territory are “resisting.”...
By P. David Hornik
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As in the days of Noah...
