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Thursday, March 06, 2008

Mass celebrations in Gaza. Just what you would expect.

In reaction to the massacre in Jerusalem today:Palestine Today (Arabic):
Following the hearing the news of the martyrdom operation in West Jerusalem, which killed ten Israelis and injuring dozens, left thousands of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to the streets in spontaneous demonstrations to express their happiness process.

A correspondent for Palestine today, that left thousands of Palestinians from various parts of the Gaza Strip and shouting binoculars, after the martyrdom operation, with heavy gunfire was heard in the skies sector.

Our correspondent added that Palestinians in the streets of Gaza were seen distributing sweets.
Are they happy because their lives are better? Because they are more secure? Because they had a great military victory?

No. They are celebrating because Jews were murdered.

Amnesty International and other "human rights" organizations, and the EU and UN and State Department can pretend all they want that everyone is the same, that everyone is equally guilty of crimes or that everyone is suffering and it is a "cycle of violence" and that it is a numbers game where motive is worthless when determining who is right and who is wrong.

But there were never any Israeli or Jewish parties celebrating the deaths of Arabs. Celebrating victories, yes; celebrating death, no. The distinction is easy to make for normal people but too many people are way too "nuanced" to notice the difference.

There is a right and a wrong, there is a morality and an immorality here. Israel's failure to be 100% perfect in every minute detail does not take away from the fact that it is light-years ahead of its celebrating Gaza neighbors in morality. A culture that strives for peace, for co-existence, for personal and collective achievement is simply not comparable to the animals who celebrate the deaths of innocents.

Earlier today I posted an article by an Iraqi who does not strike me as the type to celebrate Jewish deaths. The question is why someone like that seems to be such a tiny minority in the Middle East? We know what will happen - we will see some perfunctory condemnations by Abbas and Erekat, always with the big BUT at the end saying that we need to understand the context and the suffering and in the end it is really Israel's fault for existing and for wanting a place for Jews to live in peace and security. There are no shortage of Jews who empathize with Arabs, suffering or not, but the number of Arabs who dare speak out loud about the suffering of Jews is vanishingly small. This massacre is somewhat comparable to Boruch Goldstein's massacre in Hebron, but the visceral Israeli and Jewish disgust that followed Hebron simply will not happen in the Arab world after Kiryat Moshe.

That is the difference between the two sides. To say that they are both right, or both wrong, or both the same is a perversion of morality. No, they are not. One side - en masse, instinctively - celebrates its many mass murderers while the other side is angered and embarrassed by theirs.

Any right-thinking person would want to identify with and support the side that values life and abhors death. The people who don't - whether they are on the Left or the Right, Jewish, Muslim or Christian, New, Old or Third World - have another agenda that has nothing to do with "justice" or morality or truth.
In Gaza City, residents went out into the streets and fired rifles in celebration in the air after hearing news of the attack on the seminary. "This is God's vengeance," blared a loudspeaker in a Gaza City mosque.
Gaza's streets filled with joyous crowds of thousands on Thursday evening following the terror attack at a Jerusalem rabbinical seminary in which eight people were killed.

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.