Another horrific terrorist attack is perpetrated in Israel and we knew what to expect. A statement of outrage and condemnation from the White House, regrets from the Palestinian Authority, and from the UN a call for all sides to exercise restraint and remain committed to the (non-existent) “peace process.”
In short, yet another exercise in futility if ever there was one.
Last Thursday, while the Dow was losing another 419 points and world financial markets continued their volatile gyrations, the Obama administration, through Secretary of State Clinton, finally issued its long overdue call for Syrian dictator Bashar Assad to step aside for massacring his own people. Lost in the news cycle was the brazen series of attacks that led to the death of eight innocent Israelis, with dozens injured, near Eilat.
Further obscured were the half-hearted condemnations and perfunctory condolences from distracted world capitals.
In fact, the international community, by its continuous failure to distinguish right from wrong and its unwillingness to side with good over evil, bears culpability for this renewed cycle of violence.
When the Fogels (two parents and three of their children) were slaughtered by bloodthirsty terrorists earlier this year, their “capital crime” was peacefully living in the settlement of Itamar. But as was clear to any levelheaded person – and as should have become even clearer following last week’s attack in Eilat – the fact that the Fogels lived in a settlement outside an imaginary colored line was merely a pretext for their brutal slaughter.
It would have made no difference had they resided in Jerusalem, Paris or on the Brooklyn Bridge. Jewish blood has always been cheap. The Fogels were murdered for being Jewish. Geography and generation were minor factors.
The terrorist attack last week against innocent civilians in an indisputably Jewish area was fueled, as these attacks always are, by the hatred of Jews that permeates Arab and Muslim media. The heinous rhetoric broadcast throughout the Arab and Muslim world – which due to lack of any protest appears to be condoned even by moderate Arab and Muslim leaders – inevitably cheapens Jewish life and leads to the murder of innocent victims. No peace talks, bilateral accords, or unilateral disengagements can alter this unfortunate and undeniable truth.
Some things in the world are black and white with no shades of gray. The wanton murder and maiming of innocent bus-riding civilians is pure and unadulterated evil. Those who issue shallow and feeble condemnations, qualified by equivocations and rationalizations, are guilty of facilitating this evil.
Equally guilty of enabling this evil are intellectuals who subtly equate the murder of innocent civilians with the accidental deaths of innocent children intentionally used by cowards as human shields.
Instead of feckless and empty statements of outrage, condemnation, and regret, it would behoove the powers that be – who readily condemn Israel for every perceived building violation – to apply their indignation to the root causes of Arab and Islamic fanaticism.
Our leaders might better focus their efforts and leverage on Damascus, Tehran and Riyadh, where state-sanctioned madrasas teach young and impressionable children to hate Jews, Israel, non-Muslims, and the “West” in general and where terrorist training camps assist the graduates of these madrasas in taking their hatred to the next level.
While the Arab and Muslim street continues its march to self-implosion, be it in Tripoli, Islamabad or Cairo, it is Israel that continues to light the way with ingenuity, hope, and kindness. While the extremists murder, burn, and riot, Israel is an acknowledged world leader in setting up field hospitals, surgeons and search teams around the world whenever and wherever calamity strikes.
Is there any doubt as to what the Palestinian Authority has in store for Israelis come September as its push for Palestinian statehood commences at the UN? If history is any guide, the Arab Spring will be a walk in the park compared to the planned “non-violent” inferno headed Israel’s way.
So as Jews once again bury their dead and fathers and mothers pace the halls of Israeli trauma centers and hospitals worried over severely injured loved ones, leaders of civilized nations must know that all of humanity, not just Jews, have been betrayed by the false message of moral equivalence, as well as by moral ambivalence.