Palestinian attack March 2011

Here is a note that offer without comment, since it speaks for itself. It comes from Michael Medved.


On Friday night shortly after 10 PM, just hours after the commencement of the Jewish Sabbath, two knife-wielding intruders broke into the modest one story home of the Fogel family, murdering the mother and father in their bed along with their three month old baby girl. They then stormed one of the children’s rooms, slashing to death two boys, ages three and eleven. Two other sleeping children – aged two and eight – managed to survive when the terrorists fled the scene before they entered the other bedroom. The oldest child, a twelve year old daughter, also escaped death because of her participation in a Sabbath program of her religious youth group. When she returned to her home, she discovered the mutilated and bloody bodies of her parents, her two brothers and her infant sister. Tracks from the scene of the crime led directly to the nearby Palestinian village of Awarta. Later, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade claimed credit for the killings (though ultimately retracting that claim) and crowds in Gaza took to the streets in celebration, receiving sweets from the Hamas authorities to honor the vile deed.

Sadly, as Jeff Jacoby points out, there is a mindset that sees a massacre of Jews and concludes that Jews must in some way have provoked it. It is the mindset behind the narrative that continually blames Israel for the enmity of its neighbors, and makes it Israel's responsibility to end their violence.

But the truth is simpler, and bleaker. Human goodness is not hard-wired. It takes sustained effort and healthy values to produce good people; in the absence of those values, cruelty and intolerance are far more likely to flourish.

For years the Palestinian Authority has demonized Israelis and Jews as enemies to be destroyed, vermin to be loathed, and infidels to be terrorized with Allah's blessing. Children who grow up under Palestinian rule are inundated on all sides -- in school, in the mosques, on radio and TV, even in summer camps and popular music -- with messages that glorify bloodshed, promote hatred, and lionize "martyrdom."

None of this is news. The toxic incitement that pervades Palestinian culture has been massively documented. What children are taught in the classrooms of Ramallah, Nablus, and Gaza City, Hillary Clinton said in 2007, is "to see martyrdom and armed struggle and the murder of innocent people as ideals to strive for. . . . This propaganda is dangerous." Indeed, it is lethal.