A Terrorist’s Teenage Target
I was 17 when the bombing happened — just a few years older than many of the kids murdered this Monday night at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England. It was June 1, 2001, and I decided to go out to the Dolphinarium, a disco on the beach in Tel Aviv, with three of my friends: Liana, Oksana and Tanya.From Manchester to Jerusalem, a War on Our Way of Life
We went to that club almost every weekend. It was the summer before our mandatory army service, and we planned to spend it together — dancing, biking, swimming and tanning.
Girls could get in to the club free before midnight — and we didn’t have any money, so we decided to go early. We bought a bottle of cheap vodka from a convenience store and hung out on the beach talking and taking sips until we saw a crowd start to gather outside the door at 11:30 p.m.
Tanya and I got into the line on the left-hand side of the door; Oksana and Liana went to the right so we could all get in faster. Then, at 11:44 p.m., a Hamas suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance to the club.
Everything went mute. To this day, I don’t know if I lost consciousness. All I know is that I had flown some distance in the air, and everywhere I looked there were dead bodies. It seemed that every single person in that line had been murdered except for me. Liana died on the spot. A total of 21 people were killed, 16 of them were teenagers.
The Ariana Grande concert was not a random target. This was a deliberate and calculated jihadist terrorist attack against a group of people they particularly despise: Western girls and women whose strength, choice, and independence make them feel threatened.Europe chose to sacrifice its children to the Islamic Moloch
It fits a grim litany of crimes. Soft targets such as nightclubs and concert halls have been targeted before in Paris, Orlando, and Istanbul and it is the sad reality with which Israel has been dealing with for decades. The car rammings, the knife attacks, and other ways to kill infidels. Israel, in many ways, is the ground zero of modern terrorism.
The same ideology responsible for British authorities now having to collect and piece together what is left of the bodies of our children in the heart of Manchester, claimed the lives of 21 Israelis, 16 of them teenagers, when suicide bomber Said Khutari blew himself up at the Dolphinarium discotheque in Tel Aviv in 2001 at the height of the second intifada. He, too, murdered in the name of Islamic jihad and had ties to Hamas.
Terrorist groups come in different shapes and forms. They operate under their own names and are tied to local contexts. But, ultimately, they are united in the same Islamist fanaticism that leads Hamas to wrap suicide vests around children in Gaza just as it makes Islamic State ban music by sword wherever they go.
Try blaming that on Western foreign policy and you quickly run out of arguments. What connects the dots between terrorist attacks across the world — from Jerusalem to Manchester or Baghdad and Stockholm — is the global jihadist insurgency that has declared war on our way of life.
When did European governments decide that our children, from Nice to Manchester, must be sacrified to radical Islam and that they are to become a photo opportunity for newspapers?
Europe cries over the innocent victims. Then it plunges into its indolent normality and continues chatting.
There is an enemy, it needs to be collared and fought by paying the necessary price to defend freedom and life in the West. And yes, it is a very high price.
Europe must learn to respond the way the Russians did after Beslan, the Ossetian school where Islamic terrorists butchered hundreds of children and innocent people. Or like Israelis did after the attack at the Dolphinarium in Tel Aviv. Otherwise, Europe will reach the point where the soldiers of Allah will have to be hunted down, from door to door, as in Mosul and Raqqa.
Is it possible that Europe's leaders have chosen to avoid fighting because they are all childless?
“Est regis tueri cives." It is the king's duty to protect citizens. Or do we think that, to continue enjoy our lazy lifestyle, we must feed the Islamic Moloch, like the god of Carthage, which demanded the sacrifice of children in return for the preservation of the city?