J-Street's Ben-Ami explicitly equates murdered teens with combatants

We mentioned the implicit moral equivalence by Jodi Rudoren in the New York Times between the (then) kidnapping of Naftali Frankel, a boy who was simply trying to get home, and the IDF killing rock-throwing teen combatant Mohammed Dudeen, who sneaked out of his house just to attack Israeli soldiers.

Rudoren denied that she was making any moral equivalence, but the article was written in such a way that it is impossible to get any other impression.

Jeremy Ben-Ami of J-Street, the purportedly "pro-peace, pro-Israel" organization, went much further in a stomach-turning post on his site:

The New York Times this week ran a moving, but difficult, article about two mothers, Rachel Fraenkel and Aida Abdel Aziz Dudeen. It was written before the discovery of the body of Rachel’s 16-year-old son, Naftali, one of the three murdered teenagers. “I was praying maybe he did something stupid and irresponsible,” Ms. Fraenkel recalled thinking when police came to her door at 4 a.m., “but I know my boy isn’t stupid, and he isn’t irresponsible.”

A few miles away in the West Bank town of Dura, Aida also tried to stop her 15-year-old Mohammed from doing something stupid and irresponsible. She locked the door of the family home to stop him from going out to confront Israeli soldiers after days or house searches and arrests. He got out anyway by jumping out the window and was shot dead, with the key still under Aida's pillow, when soldiers opened fire on a group of young Palestinians hurling stones at them.

Ben-Ami, in his zeal to say that a boy trying to get a ride home is the same as a terrorist-in-training who goes out of his way to perform acts of violence, loses his reading comprehension skills. Rachel Fraenkel knew her son wasn't irresponsible; Aida Dudeen knew her son was irresponsible.

To moral midgets like Ben Ami, their deaths are equivalent.

Ben Ami is equating a properly raised boy who was killed because he was a Jew to a wannabe terrorist who turned himself into a combatant, going out of his way to attack an army. To him, both are equally tragic. And this is after he already knew that Frankel had been brutally murdered.

He then approvingly goes on to further prove that he is a morally corrupt person:

Times correspondent Jodi Rudoren succinctly summed up the gulf between the sides in the way they look at these twin tragedies. “Most Israelis see the missing teenagers as innocent civilians captured on their way home from school, and the Palestinians who were killed as having provoked soldiers. Palestinians, though, see the very act of attending yeshiva in a West Bank settlement as provocation, and complain that the crackdown is collective punishment against a people under illegal occupation.”

As President Obama memorably said in his speech to young Israelis in Jerusalem last year, we must try to see the world through the eyes of the other side.

There is a difference between being able to see the world through the eyes of the other side and approving of it. A wife-beater has a viewpoint but that doesn't give it validity. Ben-Ami cannot make the simple moral distinction between aggressor and victim, between moral claims and immoral ones. To Ben-Ami and his J-Street acolytes, the Palestinian Arab narrative of no compromise, no agreement without crippling the security of Israel, of denying Jews the right to a homeland, of explicitly advocating the ethnic cleansing of Jews from their historic homeland, of honoring terrorists and raising children to want to blow themselves up as long as they kill some Jews - all of that is morally equivalent to the Jewish longing to live in the Jewish national home in peace and security.

How sick is that?

This is the mentality that Ben-Ami brings to the table as he zealously tries to reduce US support for Israel - that Arab attackers are as innocent as kids who were killed for the crime of being Jewish.

J-Street, like "Jewish Voice for Peace," exists to provide a pseudo-Jewish cover for decidedly anti-Jewish opinions, allowing people who hate the idea of Jewish nationalism to point to people like Ben-Ami and their indefensible anti-Israel opinions and say, "See? Even Jews agree with me!"