‘The victims were sleeping as the killer came in. The paramedics described children’s toys right next to pools of blood. It’s the worst single attack in Israel’s recent history.”
That’s Giulio Meotti, describing the slaughter last week of five members of the Fogel family on the West Bank. They were killed “while they were sleeping in their home on the Sabbath evening,” as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in denouncing the act of terrorism.
In truth, as horrific as it was, the attack was far from foreign to the lives of Israelis. As is the widespread lack of outrage internationally.
Advertisement
As Meotti tells me, “Those who profess to deplore violence on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian equation have remained relatively silent on the slaughtering of this Israeli family. No words of condemnation about the killing of these innocents have been heard from the human-rights groups, the same faction that is so quick to vilify Israel for defending itself from terrorist attacks, especially when Palestinian citizens lose their lives during a retaliatory foray by Israel. There is no other conclusion to draw: When the deaths of Jewish innocents go unmourned and unacknowledged, it is because Jewish lives do not count. Where’s the outrage? Why is the world silent about the beheading of a Jewish infant? The silence has been telling.”
Meotti does a thorough, moving job of introducing the reader to the victims of Islamic, anti-Jewish terrorism. Some of those we meet are Americans. All of them were human. And none of them deserved their fate. Reading Meotti, you come to miss every single one of them, although you probably never physically met them. Meotti talked to me this week about these people who have become victims of what he calls the New Shoah, and what their lives tell us about our own. – KJL
KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Is there really a newShoahin Israel? If that’s so, why aren’t we doing more to stop it? All of us?
GIULIO MEOTTI: The Shoah was a unique evil in human history, and I had to be very careful not to make false comparisons. Through books, museums, memorials, and cinema, the Shoah has become a universal metaphor of victimization, invoked by everyone from AIDS sufferers to African-American activists (who define slavery as the “real Holocaust”) to pro-Arab propagandists portraying Palestinians as the inheritors of Nazi-era victimization. I’d prefer to avoid using the term “Shoah,” but I didn’t find any other term as accurate in describing what is happening in Israel under the hanging sword of terrorism.
Shoah is a word that, to me at least, links the generation of the Holocaust to the Israelis being killed today in their homeland. The book describes a very specific destructive process, a slow-motion 9/11 launched against civilians day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, attack after attack. We talk about 1,600 innocent dead, murdered in cold blood, targets of a planned genocidal program, the proportional equivalent to 85,000 American victims.
I spent six years tracking down and interviewing witnesses to terrorist atrocities — including people who survived attacks and family members of those who did not. I heard about scores of young people and children, women and elderly, incinerated on buses; cafés, pizzerias, and shopping centers turned into slaughterhouses; mothers and daughters killed in front of ice-cream shops; entire families exterminated in their own beds; infants executed with a blow to the base of the skull; teens tortured and their blood smeared on the walls of a cave; fruit markets blown to pieces; nightclubs annihilated along with dozens of students; seminarians murdered during their Biblical studies; husbands and wives killed in front of their children; brothers and sisters, grandparents and grandchildren murdered together; children murdered in their mothers’ arms.
I take a back seat to no one in my defense of Israel and the Jewish people, but I still wouldn’t characterize the recent murders as part of a new Shoah. I have little doubt that the Palestinians and much of the Islamic world would implement a new Shoah if they had the power, and I also suspect that much of Europe would celebrate that, but that doesn’t change the facts on the ground, which aren’t really comparable with the Holocaust. So long as the Jews have the means to successfully defend themselves, there will not be a new Shoah, no matter how desperately the Islamic world wants it.
I do applaud Mr. Meotti for doing a great service in chronicling the Jewish victims of terrorism, I just wish he’d chosen a less provocative title for his book.
What the so-called Palestinians and their Western enablers are doing is a Shoah in slow motion. They are slowly killing, maiming, destroying and dehumanizing. If they succeed, the USA will also fall.
Now, if only those at Oberlin College and so many other American universities could bring themselves to stop referring to Israel's defense of life and limb as Israeli Apartide, we might actually be getting somewhere.
However,it appears that the belief in collectivism, shared by the American Left and the Islamic Fundamentalists trumps any Western Leftist concern for lives of the Israelis.
Like Chamberlin, before them, the Left is willing to sacrifice whole countries in furtherance of their political goals. The shift to blaming Israelis for their own deaths and dismemberments is but another salvo in an ongoing ideological war.
Meanwhile, Hamas is thrilled. The celebrations and the slaughter, pointedly ignored by the Left and the main stream media, will continue.
This is very powerful and provocative. Mr. Meotti is performing for us a great service through his reporting. The lives, names, hopes, and aspirations of the innocents lost should be never be forgotten.
This interview gave me a lump in my throat and brought tears to my eyes. I was living in Israel during the 2nd intifada. I feared taking the bus home from work, stopping in my car at a red light if it was next to a bus, and looked for a table at the back of a restaurant far away from the front door. But that was me, an American thinking I could handle the violent crimes committed here in the USA and fearing for my life in beautiful Israel surrounded by my people. Some of my family and friends live in Israel are they are the strong ones and I'm proud and grateful that they are strong-willed. Even today, Jews are not safe in other countries, just look at what is going on in Europe and in the USA. It's so fashionable now to be openly anti-semetic. I feel that I'm living in a bizarre - warped reality that even today, Jews are hated and blamed for everything, even if there is no rationale behind it. What will the Europeans say when their life and culture are threatened, when your country will have an explosion of muslim population, enough to change the political scene because sorry to say, you're almost there...and then you will become the odd man out, isolated and in danger. When there are no Jews left for the muslims to persecute and kill you will be next. Then they will go after the liberals, but liberals are cowards. The women will quickly dress in burka's and the men will proudly adapt to Sharia. I wonder what N.O.W. will look like after that happens.
it now seems possible that the horrendous Itamar massacre may not have been the work of a Palestinian (as you wishfully expected) but could have been the act of a disgruntled worker from Thailand who was furious after a dispute over unpaid wages. The Thai worker had apparently threatened to kill a settler family after he was not paid 10,000 shekels in wages which he believes he was owed.
Local israele reports also claim that Thai workers in Israel are being "rounded up", which suggests that the authorities know the truth, although the reports have not been confirmed because the Israelis have placed a "gag order" on the investigation. Sadly, this revelation has come too late for hundreds of innocent Palestinians who have been targeted and harassed severely in response to this crime over the past few days.
If, after days of violence and intimidation of innocent Palestinians, it emerges that the killings were carried out by a disgruntled Thai worker, it should be a source of great embarrassment to Israel and its vociferous supporters who have demonised the Palestinians even more than usual in their blogs and websites; one "strategic advisor and crisis management expert" by the name of Roni Rimon has called the Palestinians "animals" in response. Such people are shameless. From the very beginning Palestinians have denied involvement in the killings: "The militant wings of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah have all denied involvement in the murders, with the Al-Aqsa Brigades saying on Monday that they ‘oppose the targeting of civilians and killing of children no matter what the pretext may be'."
Regardless of whom the Itamar killer turns out to be, Israel has negatively exposed itself to the world through its reaction to this incident. While the killing of one family is undoubtedly a horrific crime, the persecution of an entire people and occupation of their land under the pretext of justice is surely a crime more horrific and beyond comparison.
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb on March 18, 2011: "Only a person living in a bubble could fail to understand the dire situation of the Palestinian people under Israeli Occupation. Only people who never watch the news could fail to notice the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem which is taking place before our very eyes. Or the building of a Museum for Jewish Tolerance over a historic Muslim graveyard. Or the arrest of over sixty West Bank children in the middle of the night by the IDF from villages nonviolently protesting the Separation Wall."
That's interesting! Do you have anything other than hearsay?
(I've learned my lesson about believing stories I have no hard facts on.)
I get the sneaking suspicion that those "peaceful protesters" might have been accidentally firing rockets at Jewish children.
Also "collateral damage" seems evil to me but how do you end that? No one will stop fighting so how do you end people dying by accident in the battles? Surely this is a problem not just for Jews but also for Americans, Europeans, Russians and Islamic terrorists (though perhaps those at the end of the list aren't as bothered by it as you and me).
I am 72 years old; too old to cry. But I still shed tears for what the world is allowing to happen in Israel. To me (and this is only my opinion) the Bible is the most accurate and the oldest history book in existence. Abraham paid cash for Jerusalem. No one else should ever own it but the Jews. I am not Jewish, but I shed tears for them because most of the world abandons them. And the world allows these atrocities to continue.
The Israel Defense Forces should become the offense force and attack ALL enemy installations in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank while simultaneously destroying Syria's weapons stock pile and casche's that is shipped to Hamas, Hezbollah and Fatah!!
