Leave it to CNN to make a terrorist attack that killed five members of the Fogel family recently look like a botched burglary.
Kevin Flower's filed a report, entitled;"Israeli family of 5 killed in 'terror attack', military says." on CNN's web site. The quotation marks around the words "terror attack" suggest that there is some doubt that the slaughter may have been motivated by terrorism.
The editorial continues: "Five members of an Israeli family were killed in the West Bank early Saturday morning in what the Israeli military is calling a 'terror attack.' According to a military spokeswoman, an intruder entered the Israeli settlement of Itamar near the northern West Bank city of Nablus around 1 am, made his way into a family home, and killed two parents and their three children."
Nor was CNN alone. The LA Times shockingly claimed that the slaughter of the Fogel family was part of an ongoing "cycle of violence" (meaning: no guilty party), where "settlements" were responsible for provoking the "baby killings" (meaning: living in a suburb is morally equivalent to killing a baby). Sky News maintained that "settlements trump baby killers." The BBC cast doubt on the terrorist aspect of the murders by using them instead as a springboard to malign Israeli suburbs; and the Muslim Brotherhood's spiritual mentor, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, ruled that even the unborn Israeli child in the womb is a legitimate target for death because one day he will wear a uniform. Sadly, no words of condemnation about this butchery have been expressed by any of the human-rights groups that are so quick to vilify Israel for defending itself from terrorist attacks.
By excusing these murders as a justifiable Palestinian response to Israeli suburbs, the Western media is preventing the solution to this conflict: If, to them, calls to murder, acts of murder and celebrations of murder have been considered socially acceptable forms of behavior for over two decades, why should the Palestinians ever see a need to confront this savage aspect of their society? If they are never held to account for their actions, why should they ever think anything they do is wrong?
As Bret Stephens notes in the Wall Street Journal: "Palestinians have grown accustomed to the waiver the rest of the world has consistently granted them over the years no matter what they do. Palestinians ought to have expectations of themselves if they mean to build a viable state. But their chances of doing so are considerably diminished if the world expects nothing of them and forgives them for everything."
When news of the massacre broke, the residents of the Palestinian town of Rafah in Gaza took to the streets in jubilation, throwing candies into the air to celebrate the slaughter.. One resident said that the joy was "a natural response to the harm settlers inflict on the Palestinian residents in the West Bank." According to this mindset, a genuine Palestinian "hero" is one who has the "courage" to break into a home in the dead of night, and slit the throats of sleeping victims, including a three-month-old girl. These "heroes" are then regularly immortalized in the Palestinians' pantheon of murderers, whose names adorn sports tournaments, streets, city squares and children's camps, where they are revered as "martyrs" and role models for Palestinian children to emulate.
The President of the United States incorrectly sees the conflict in purely territorial terms; he fails to understand that-- according to the "moderate" Palestinian Charter, "moderate" Palestinian maps, and the immoderate Hamas Charter -- to Palestinians, the entire state of Israel is a "settlement." When the president urges American Jewish leaders in Washington on March 1st to "search your souls" over Israel's seriousness about making peace, he not only fails to acknowledge what Israel has done in its quest for peace -- for example, exiting Lebanon and Gaza -- but he also excuses, by omission, what the Palestinians have not done.
Recent unreciprocated concessions also include Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's acceptance of Palestinian statehood, and the concept of two states for two peoples..Netanyahu temporarily prohibited Jewish construction on the West Bank; put a hold on Jewish construction in Jerusalem; prohibited Jewish building on the West Bank and Jerusalem following the end of his construction ban; curtailed IDF counter-terrorism operations on the West Bank; looked the other way on illegal Arab construction in Jerusalem; allowed the deployment of a US-trained Palestinian army on the West Bank knowing the day may come when they might turn their weapons on Israelis; removed over 400 security checkpoints on the West Bank to facilitate Palestinian travel; and eased the Israeli embargo on Gaza despite Hamas's outspoken goal of exterminating Israel; the 2005 Gaza withdrawal that quickly led to a Hamas-controlled terrorist enclave on Israel's southern border that continues to fire missiles into Israel's civilian population centers; and a complete withdrawal from Southern Lebanon, which now has more increasingly accurate and farther-reaching Hizballah weaponry pointed at Israel than ever before..
Absent from the President's remarks was any criticism of the Palestinian Authority in sending monthly stipends to families of Palestinian terrorists who murder Israelis; denying Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state; its support for terrorism as a means of "resistance;" its continuing violation of the Oslo Accords by seeking to establish a Palestinian state without direct negotiations with Israel; and its refusal to end, or even curtail, the fuelling of throat-slitting hate that pours out of its mosques, its songs, its educational system, its textbooks, and its TVs, its radios, and even its crossword puzzles [www.palwatch.org and www.MEMRI.org]. The Palestinians leaders say they condemn murder while in the next breath they spur on, celebrate and reward murder.
Further, no administration has ever conditioned financial aid to the Palestinians on the cessation of such a stirring up of violence, as was done so successfully by the late Senator, Henry Jackson in ensuring that all grain to Russia was dependent on its compliance with human rights, in allowing anyone to leave who wanted to. Instead, the Palestinians are given what look like bribes to stop stirring up violence; then, when the violence still does not stop, they are given what look like even greater bribes. Would you stop? The Palestinians must also have done the math and figured that if they ever did stop, the bribes would stop, too.
Although many Palestinians genuinely desire an end to hostilities, "Palestinian nationalism" continues to be based on one issue alone – the death of Israel. From the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000, the Palestinians have supported the slaughter of over 100 Israeli children; murdered teenagers studying in their schools, civilians in their buses and cafes, and have attempted to murder children in nursery schools and child care centers.Are these not '"war crimes," "disproportionate use of force" and "collective punishment?"
The Palestinian Authority has brainwashed and exploited its own children into becoming suicide bombers -- which one would think would be a clear violation of the human rights of the child - solely for the purpose of murdering Israelis in discotheques, buses, pizzerias, cafes and supermarkets. meanwhile, the international community is mute. Has it really accepted the pretext that Jewish settlers and their homes on 2% of the West Bank are at the core of the Middle East conflict? Those who were butchered are demonized, while those who butchered them are absolved of responsibility. By dubbing the victims "radical settlers," the Palestinians and much of the mainstream media maintain that the Fogels brought this horror upon themselves, that they deserved what they got, and it is Israeli intransigence that is responsible for their deaths. In Palestinian eyes, and in the columns of the mainstream media, anything a Palestinian does to an Israeli is a consequence of "the occupation," which still includes -- according to the "moderate" Palestinian Charter, all maps, all textbooks, and all media -- every last inch in Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
To them, it is irrelevant that the Arab Middle East is exploding on non-Israel-related issues, or that conflicts between Arab and Muslim countries have been ongoing since Muslims brought on the Crusades, or that Sunnis and Shiites have been at each others' throats for centuries. One just must never, ever look at the actions of the Palestinians or consider their real motives, openly stated in their charter, their schools, their summer camps their textbooks, their maps, their children's TV shows, and even their soccer stadiums. They have turned down offers of a Palestinian Stare so many times -- without even a counter-offer -- that It is hard not to wonder whether they really want a "Palestinians State," or simply "No Jewish State."
As for politicians and the media, it is easier to try to to compel Israel to cease the construction of homes in its capital than to deal with Iran's and North Korea's nuclear programs; the genocide in Darfur; Hezbollah's coup in Lebanon, or the sense of betrayal felt by Iranian and Syrian dissidents.
But the response of world's leaders, newspaper editors, intellectuals, television commentators, filmmakers, the European Union, and even the President of the United States, has merely been to insist that Israel make even concessions -- especially at a time when one does not even know who will be ruling the countries next to it next week -- while at the same time holding the Palestinians -- and most countries in the Arab and Muslim world -- to no moral, ethical or political benchmarks whatever. If the Palestinians and Arab and Muslim countries are always given a pass for bad behavior -- and often even rewarded for it -- why should they ever make peace?
