This is why we fight

From Mark Steyn at NRO

On Friday night, twelve-year old Tamar Fogel came home to find both her parents, Ruth and Udi Fogel, two brothers Yoav (11) and Elad (four), and her three-month old sister Hadas murdered in their beds. They had had their throats cut and been stabbed through the heart.

That’s not shocking: There is no shortage of young Muslim men who would enjoy slitting the throat of a three-month old baby, and then head home dreaming of the town square or soccer tournament to be named in their honor.

Back in Gaza, the citizenry celebrated the news by cheering and passing out sweets.
That’s not shocking, either: In the broader Palestinian death cult, there are untold legions who, while disinclined to murder Jews themselves, are content to revel in the glorious victory of others.

And out in the wider world there was a marked reluctance to cover the story.

And, if not exactly shocking, that was a useful reminder of how things have changed even in a few years. On 9/11, footage of Palestinians dancing in the streets and handing out candy turned up on the world’s TV screens, and that rancid old queen Arafat immediately went into damage-control mode and hastily arranged for himself to be filmed giving blood. This time round there was no need for damage-control, because there was no damage: The western media simply averted their eyes from their Palestinian house pets’ unfortunate effusions. The Israeli Government released raw footage from the murders, but YouTube yanked the video within two hours. The hip new “social media” are developing almost as exquisitely refined a sense of discretion as the old Social Register.

As Caroline Glick writes:

A decade ago, the revelation that French ambassador to Britain Daniel Bernard referred to Israel as “that shi**y little country,” was shocking. Now it is standard fare.

Today the delegitimization of Israel is all but universal: Indeed, these days Palestinian leaders pay more lip service to the “two-state solution” than Europeans. On Israel’s national day, prominent Britons of Jewish background write to The Guardian to deplore the existence of the Jewish state. And “Israeli Apartheid Week” is multiculti Toronto’s gift to the world.

Demonstrating his uncanny ability to miss the point, the head of the Canadian Jewish Congresstweeted today:

Anonymity breeds ugliness online.

You would think even this sad, irrelevant fool might have noticed that the striking feature of today’s “ugliness” is how non-anonymous it is. Year on year, the world is more cheerfully upfront about its anti-Semitism. Maybe he could ask John Galliano, or Julian Assange.

But sometimes, as when a baby has her throat slashed, what’s not said is just as telling. Recently I was talking to a Hungarian Jew who lived in hiding in Budapest during the Second World War: By 1944, the pro-German government was running short of ammo, so they were obliged to get a little creative. They’d handcuff Jews together in a long chain, stand them on a bridge, put a bullet in the ones at each end, and then push them into the Danube to let the dead weight drag down the ones in between. You have to have a strong stomach for such work, perhaps almost as strong as for killing three-month olds. But, as my friend told his tale, I thought not of the monsters on the bridge, nor even those on the banks cheering, but about the far larger numbers of people scurrying about their business and rationalizing what was going on. That’s what made the difference, then as now.

UPDATE: Claire Berlinski, who is on the scene in Itamar, writes that Hadas was, in fact,decapitated:

Anyone who in any way tries to rationalize or minimize this or to suggest that this is a fitting punishment for anything needs to go out and look at a three-month-old baby and ask himself what it would take to climb over a fence, climb in a window, and cut off that child’s head.