For too long now the true horrors of what Palestinians endure has been glossed over, covered up or cynically justified by an Israeli state that has now lost what moral compass it ever possessed.I wrote a response:
Palestinians were understandably outraged over the arson attack. Most Israelis were horrified, as was much of the world.
The Israeli author David Grossman - who some years ago I had the pleasure of spending time with in Edinburgh - summed up the feeling of many ordinary Israelis when he wrote in the daily newspaper Haaretz, that “I cannot get this baby, Ali Dawabsheh, out of my mind ... Who is the person or persons capable of doing this? They, or their friends, continue to walk among us this morning.”
Grossman is right in saying that such monsters walk among ordinary Israelis.
Many would go further and say these disseminators of hatred have done so for some time. Their ranks too have gone unchallenged by an Israeli government fearful of forfeiting support in helping its politicians get elected.
Those disseminators we are talking about of course are Jewish extremists and nationalists, many with links to the country’s settler movement.
Along the way this dark, fanatical and sometimes underground force have become terrorists in a land where that epithet is usually only reserved for Palestinians. In the headlong pursuit of their bigoted goals they are succeeding in crushing underfoot the very soul of the Jewish state they so stridently and violently seek to uphold.
No one is saying that the crime wasn't horrific. No one is saying that the murderers should not be severely punished. No one is saying that there isn't a problem with extreme right wing Jews.
However, there is something else that no one is saying.
When Arabs are behind similar atrocities against Jews in Israel - for example, the slaughter of the Fogel family, where an infant was decapitated, or the sniper who targeted another infant in her stroller in Hebron - the terrorists are not vilified by the Palestinian leadership. There is no soul searching among Arabs. On the contrary, all too often the murderers are hailed as heroes. Mahmoud Abbas has literally embraced the most heinous of murderers.
There have been too many terrible crimes on both sides. Yet the daily incitement and praise for terrorists in Arab media, on Palestinian TV and newspapers, is not covered in newspapers like the Herald. Public squares and football tournaments are routinely named after terrorists.
Jews in Israel reacted as one in horror at this attack. sad to say, Arabs have not ever truly denounced any similarly sickening Arab terror attack outside of perfunctory condemnations by officials who were pressured by America. The Arab media has never reacted with revulsion.
So while it is easy to say that there is something rotten in the state of Israel, there is something far more rotten in the Palestinian territories - but the news media does not want to talk about that. The polls that show majority support for specific terror attacks after the fact do not get coverage in the West.
And that absence of coverage is, effectively, condoning the explicit support for terror that is endemic in Palestinian society.
There is something rotten going on, but it is not from an Israel that fights against its own terrorists. It is from Palestinian society that embraces theirs.
Keep in mind that the perpetrators have not been found. The more I look at this story the less sense it makes that Jews burned the house (the location, the graffiti, the effort necessary.)
But even assuming that Jewish terrorists were behind it is simply irresponsible and borderline antisemitic to tar all settlers, or religious Jews, with this crime. And that is exactly what this article is doing.