Arab terrorists threw a pipe bomb at Rachel's Tomb late Wednesday afternoon. The bomb caused no injuries or damage. Army forces are searching for the terrorists.A similar news brief was printed in YNet, I could find no mention in the Jerusalem Post nor Haaretz yet.
Let's look at some context.
If a Koran gets desecrated anywhere in the world, it makes headlines. If a Jew would throw a pipe-bomb at the Al Aqsa Mosque, the supposed third-holiest site in Islam, it would cause deadly riots and possibly a war.
But a pipe-bomb aimed at Judaism's third-holiest site barely rates a paragraph even in the most religious-Zionist publication in Israel. No one will make a big deal over it, there will be no angry editorials or calls for holy war or condemnations or apologies.
Even though quantitatively and qualitatively, it is equivalent to a Jew attacking the Dome of the Rock.
The reason for the lack of interest is simple: it is because there have been countless attacks on Rachel's Tomb. It is no longer news. It is no big deal that, yet again, some Arabs tried to destroy or damage an enduring symbol of Judaism. It falls below the radar of our consciousness.
But because of its banality, because of the sheer number of similar and constant attacks on not just Israel but Judaism from adherents of Islam, all of us eventually get numbed to the fact that this is an outrage.
By virtue of the sheer number of similar outrages done by Arabs day in and day out, the Arabs end up getting a free pass from the world who no longer expect them to act any better. Attacks such as this can happen without any fear of consequence, and the Palestinian Arab community as a whole supports and cheers such attacks while the world yawns.
To the average Joe who skims the headlines or watches the news on TV, this morning's attack against a major shrine in Judaism never happened. And as a result, the average person can be forgiven for assuming that each side is equally wrong, that each side does bad stuff, that it is everybody's fault. There is simply no easy way to know the truth.
Where the press fails is in not showing context. If you put it in quantitative and qualitative terms, by any measure, you can see that what the Palestinian Arabs are doing is hundreds of times worse than the worst that the Israelis are doing. Rachel's Tomb is not a Zionist outpost, it is a holy shrine for Judaism. And we are not even mentioning the crimes done constantly against the Tomb of the Patriarchs, Joseph's Tomb or the site of the Second Temple.
If someone repeats the same crime every day without consequence, eventually nobody cares. Until the victim finally decides to do something about it.
Then he becomes the "aggressor" who is instigating a "cycle of violence."