Will the Threat From ISIS End the Double Standard on Israel?
The first post-Paris terror incident in France was the stabbing of an Orthodox Jewish teacher by an ISIS sympathizer. The world reacted with a collective yawn.David Horovitz: Beating the Islamist death cult
In the Jewish state, a year and a day after two Palestinians used meat cleavers to literally butcher Rabbis at prayer in a Jerusalem Synagogue, terrorists murdered Jews at prayer in Tel Aviv and gunned down an American Yeshiva student and two Israelis on a West Bank road. Much of the reportage defaulted to the “cycle of violence” in the Holy Land and listed statistics of how many died on “both sides.”
Prime Minister Netanyahu wrote on Facebook: “Behind these terrorist attacks stands radical Islam, which seeks to destroy us, the same radical Islam that struck in Paris and threatens all of Europe. Whoever condemned the attacks in France needs to condemn the attacks in Israel. It’s the same terror. Whoever does not do this is a hypocrite and blind.”
But while leaders quietly appreciate the real-time intelligence Israel is providing to France and the media dutifully reported that Israeli radar was the first to detect evidence that a bomb brought down the Russian jet over Sinai, sympathy for Israelis cut down by terrorist is rarely expressed and Palestinian terrorism is rarely condemned.
The war on terror is indivisible. After France’s 11/13, the world has another opportunity to launch a global action plan.
A key starting point is to reject the “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” mantra that provides moral cover for those who direct or benefit from terrorism. It has worked especially well for Palestinian leaders. Why stop terror, when millions keep flowing in from donor nations, when human rights NGOs maintain a stoic silence when Jewish blood flows and when diplomatic legitimacy continues to expand?
Hopefully, ISIS will disappear at some point. But if the scourge of our time is to defeated, civilized civilized people must set a single standard in the war to eradicate terrorism. Otherwise, new deadly acronyms of terror will emerge. And we and our children will be no safer.
As we watch all those Palestinian kids’ TV shows urging Jew-killing, read the Fatah and Hamas calls to murder, see the mothers and fathers of the daily murderers hailing their “martyred” children, the last thing we’re saying is, Let’s entrust these people with full sovereignty, so that they can more easily fulfill their stated ambition of pushing us into the sea. As we guard against them, all our differences — the arguments over settlements, over how to maintain a Jewish-democratic Israel, over what more we can do to create an environment more likely to encourage moderation — are simply overwhelmed and rendered irrelevant.Elliott Abrams: Unspeakable Kerry
For now, Israelis are having to adjust their daily lives, to minimize their vulnerability, to guard against the banal norm of relaxing when out and about. More security forces are being deployed. The intelligence hierarchies are working overtime.
None of which constitutes a means of defanging Islamist terrorism at its source. For that — precisely as with the mass terror onslaught in Paris 10 days ago, and the dire ongoing threat of further Islamist terror coming West — what’s needed is concerted action at the grassroots.
When people come at you with a gun or a knife or scissors or bombs or their car, you had better stop them first. Ideally, you’ll identify and thwart them before they set out. The fight needs to be physically taken to the enemy. But it also needs to be waged educationally — in the schools and the mosques and online. The advocates and apologists must be afforded no tolerance.
We’ll not beat the many-headed Islamist terror monster until that ostensible religious imperative is shattered — until radical Islam, that is, is exposed, marginalized and ultimately defeated as the murderous death cult it is.
It seems that to Kerry, when people kill journalists and Jews, that is not an attack on “everything that we do stand for,” whereas attacking a restaurant and stadium and a concert hall is. A bit odd: Do we stand for good food and sports and music more than we stand for freedom of the press and freedom of religion? Kerry seems confused here, but we get the point. He is saying that it’s understandable when people murder innocents because they have a particular reason to be mad at them, but now the terrorists are attacking all of us. He contrasts, perhaps without even knowing what he was saying, last “Friday night when people were going about their normal business” with that other Friday night in January, when some people were instead out preparing for Shabbat.
Few of us are cartoonists and few of us shop in kosher delis, but any of us at all might be a target now. So now to Kerry this is an attack on everything we do stand for, which apparently may not include protecting religious minorities and journalists, who perhaps are to blame in some sense for their own troubles. Somehow it is far worse in his mind to attack “all sense of nationhood and nation-state.” This is bizarre in the extreme. When Jews are attacked we all know why, but when France is attacked, well, that is simply unspeakable.
In October 1980, there was another terrorist attack on Paris. The synagogue on the Rue Copernic was bombed while it was packed with Jewish worshipers. Four people were killed and 46 wounded. Prime Minister Raymond Barre said on television the next day, “This odious bombing wanted to strike Jews who were going to the synagogue and it hit innocent French people who crossed Rue Copernic.”
Kerry is regarded as an enlightened man and without bigotry or prejudice of any kind, which makes his remarks all the more interesting. If his language was incoherent at times, his thoughts were not, and they are remarkably close to those of Barre and to his distinction between Jews and “innocent” Frenchmen. The November 13 attacks, Kerry appears to be thinking, are more terrible than the January attacks because those shootings hit Jews and cartoonists, but these hit, as Barre would have put it, “innocent French people”—people like you and me going to dinner or a concert. This is a statement not of solidarity with targeted victim groups but of distancing from them, and as such it is an immoral and disgusting position. Kerry’s Harvard statement blaming (nonexistent) Israeli settlement expansion for Palestinian stabbing attacks is equally offensive. That this is the thinking of the American secretary of state during a period of rising terrorism, especially against Jews, is almost unbelievable.