The world says the Holocaust was a long time ago, that Jews should stop talking about it, that focusing on it is too painful. But it was only seven decades ago, the average length of mortal life, so if we stop talking about it, who will remember? The world, does, however, continue to discuss Columbus’s genocide of the New World’s aborigines, the Trail of Tears, and the slavery of blacks in the antebellum American South.
Last week’s attack was not an isolated event by lawless renegades. It is an outgrowth of an ideology that at the very least tacitly permits this behavior, knowing the world will largely be indifferent. Or worse, it is another example of the inculcated destructiveness of this ideology, orchestrated with hateful, malicious, nihilistic, and genocidal intentions. While one may wish to sympathize with (or even pathologize) poverty in the Muslim world (or other factors), and how those factors influence behavior, one must not forget that there are now four more dead Jews.
There are four more dead Jews because these Muslims chose, of their own free will, to massacre them with guns and hatchets. That’s not a symptom of anything; that’s a crime and that’s murder. Yet it is painfully, sinfully true that in many cases the world still doesn’t care when Jewish blood is spilled.
The core Jewish prayer concludes with the words “Blessed are You, who blesses His nation Israel with peace.” These were the words, directed passionately to Heaven, which had passed through the lips of last week’s victims shortly before they were barbarically killed. The Jew wants peace, too many Muslims want war, and the rest of the world wants the problem to just go away.
The Hebrew Bible, one of the foundations of Western law and morality, teaches the following: “I call on heaven and earth to testify for you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life.”