Wednesday, September 21, 2022
Elder of Ziyon
Yesterday, a Palestinian man stalked and murdered an 84 year old Jewish grandmother in Holon. She was identified as Shulamit Rachel Ovadia.
Palestinian terror groups are happy - but they pointedly do not mention the age of the victim. Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades describes the victim as "a Zionist usurper killed in a commando operation." Palestine Today, associated with Islamic Jihad, called her a "female settler."
Israeli security services suspect that it was a terror attack, since nothing was taken from her.
The suspect, Mousa Sarsour from Qalqilya, was found this morning after apparently committing suicide, hanging himself in an abandoned Tel Aviv building. He had a valid work permit in Israel.
When attacks like these happen, the reactions (and non-reactions) from the anti-Israel crowd reveal a great deal.
More mainstream Palestinian newspapers understand that murdering an elderly lady is not something to be proud of. So they are instead quoting the suspect's family, saying that he suffers psychological problems - but he couldn't have murdered her anyway.
Jewish anti-Zionists who claim to care about human rights become deathly silent when the victim is an elderly Jewish woman. The anger that they show when Israeli forced kill a teen throwing Molotov cocktails evaporates when the Jewish victim did nothing to provoke the attack. Their righteous indignation, ready to ignite on a moment's notice at the death of a Palestinian, is simply nonexistent. I can find nothing in the social media accounts of the anti-Israel activists I follow.
To them, Palestinians are pure good and Zionist Jews are pure evil, and they are so invested in pushing that narrative that they will never say a negative word about a terror attack, no matter how heinous. They will go to rallies to support Rasmea Odeh but do not want you to know the name Shulamit Rachel Ovadia.
One Israeli leftist - Dror Etkes, who heads the Kerem Navot NGO - tries to redirect the conversation to make this about Israeli racism:
The man murdered an 84-year-old woman and then committed suicide. Horrifying and shocking by any measure. The man was not investigated and from what has been published so far, it is not known what his motive is. What's more, it is very uncharacteristic for someone with a nationalistic motive to commit suicide after a murder. But the fact that he was Palestinian and she is Israeli, is also enough for the newspaper Haaretz to call him a "terrorist"And maybe he was "just" a psychopath?So that's it, a Palestinian cannot be a psychopath, because if he kills an Israeli, that means he is by definition a "terrorist". I don't know what was the motive behind this horrible act. It seems that even the police and the network do not know. But I do know that there are Palestinians who are "just" psychopaths. By the way, there are also such Jews.
To Etkes, the characterization of a murderer of an 84 year old woman as a terrorist is just evidence of Israeli racism. (He also uses the propaganda method of "sure, the attack is horrifying, but look at how terrible the reaction is!")
His theory might make sense if there were random murders of unrelated Palestinians by Palestinian psychopaths. In general, there are very few reports of anything like that.
Mousa Sarsour went out of his way to kill a Jewish woman in Israel, and even if he did have psychological problems, the reason for choosing a Jew has everything to do with Palestinian antisemitism that is called "nationalism." It has everything to do with the social and monetary benefits in Palestinian society of murdering Jews.
Most terrorists, including suicide bombers, are not entirely sane. To claim (without evidence) that this was just a psychopath is simply another way to justify terror.
