There was dancing in the streets of the Palestine territories on Tuesday, complete with the traditional handing out of sweets to the children, in celebration of the slaughter of five godly men worshiping at an Israeli synagogue. Reaction among those Palestinians’ many sympathizers here in America was more muted, but no less disturbing.
The President of the United States chose strong words to condemn the murders, but felt obliged to add that “too many Palestinians have died” as a result of Israel’s efforts to defend itself against such slaughter. He further asserted that a “majority of Palestinians want peace,” despite all those sweets being handed out on the streets of the Palestinian territory and the majority of its population that has consistently supported the Hamas terror gang that shares in power in its government and has also celebrated the murders, and thus left the impression that he would continue to insist on further Israeli concessions and self-restraint to achieve his stated goal of a Palestinian state. Most of the anti-Israel left responded with an appalling silence, but a few ventured the usual claims of moral equivalence between the Palestinians’ slaughter of random civilians with Israel’s carefully calculated strikes against terrorists. On the Cable News Network they reflexively misreported that the murders had been committed at a mosque, but even after correcting the rather significant error they invited a woman on the air to argue that because Israel has been forced by constant attacks of its neighbors to impose universal conscription it cannot suffer civilian casualties, and much of the media seemed committed to a similar evenhandedness between the killers and their victims. The Israeli government has ordered the demolition of the killers’ homes and eased restrictions on Israelis’ gun rights to allow them to defend themselves against a recent spate of lone wolf attacks on the citizenry, so we expect the left’s sensibilities to be further offended.
No one seemed willing to acknowledge that the attacks had something to do with the same religious supremacism that has lately led to the slaughter of westerners from Iraq to England to Canada to Oklahoma, even though the killers’ proud families and organizations were loudly proclaiming that motivation. Although it was widely reported that three of victims were Americans and one a Briton, and that the New York City Police Department is on alert to prevent similar acts of violence in its jurisdiction, too late to prevent the savage beating of a 53-year-old Jew at a subway station, and even though there’s a vague memory of the Palestinians dancing in the streets and handing out sweets in celebration of the slaughter of 3,000 Americans on a warm September morning some years ago, no one seemed willing to acknowledge that Israel’s fight for survival has something to do with civilization’s ongoing fight for survival.
After too many desultory conversations with the Palestinians’ sympathizers, we have reluctantly concluded they have less regard for civilization than a sentimental attraction to the killers’ claims of victimhood. The profound western civilization that has largely derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition provides them with a prosperity and freedom and opportunities for happiness unprecedented in the history of mankind, but it has also resulted in the inequalities and imperfections that are inherent in any society of humans, so they prefer the primitivism of their society’s enemies. They denounce the sexism of a society that subjects women to a scientist’s ribald shirts, and decry the homophobia of a nation whose courts haven’t yet fully imposed same-sex marriage on a wary populace, but make apologies for a religious movement that subjugates its women in ways that the women of medieval Europe would have never tolerated and whose courts have not yet decided whether beheading or stoning is the proper punishment for homosexuality.
They might yet rouse some resistance when the slaughter is visited upon their own communities, although the left’s supine response to the slaughter of 3,000 Americans on a warm September morning a few short years ago and the countless outrages that have occurred since leave little cause for hope, and when the slaughter of five godly men worshiping at an Israeli synagogue disappears from the news in a few days it will seem all the more unlikely.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 