Wake up, apologists

Editorial

As grief-stricken Israeli families lamented the losses resulting from the cold-blooded murder of eight yeshivah students in Jerusalem last week, Palestinians were celebrating the slaughter like they had won the World Cup.

Apologists for Palestinian violence – who seem to be ascendant in the Canadian, American and European left, among other places – will insist these images of Palestinians celebrating a massacre are extreme and unrepresentative exceptions. They will make the same justifications and utter the same easy dismissals they muttered when Palestinians celebrated when the planes hit the World Trade Centre; they will exhibit the same nonchalance with which they greeted the lynching of Israeli soldiers who took a wrong turn in Ramallah and whose entrails were exhibited from a second-floor window to ecstatic rapture from the throngs below, while Palestinian police stood idle. They will make the same tired excuses for Palestinian atrocities that they have been asserting since this intifada began eight years ago, after Yasser Arafat upended the negotiating table and returned to his comfortable old blanket of terror.

They will level accusations of racism upon those who recognize the inherent inhumanity demonstrated by these Palestinians; of tarring an entire people with the acts of a few. But, this behavior is indicative of something almost completely unique to Palestine, and these violent acts and their moral supporters are too common to be dismissed as exceptional.

If these acts do not represent an inhumanity symptomatic of Palestinian society as a whole, this would be due more to good luck than to good management. For decades, the Palestinian leadership has done everything in its power to turn its citizens into just the sort of bloodthirsty murderers we saw at Mercaz Harav yeshivah last week, or battling each other, Fatah versus Hamas, in Gaza last year. The indoctrination of brutality seems to be the one thing the Palestinian government has been able to achieve with any degree of comprehensiveness or success.

The universal inculcation of Jew-hatred – not just garden variety anti-Semitism but murderous Jew-hatred in the vein of Nazism and using the same imagery – has been the sole noteworthy achievement of Arafat and the democratically elected terrorists who succeeded him. It is the official line of the Palestinian Authority public broadcasters, it infects the orations of imams who beat homicidal theology into their supplicants, it defines the pedagogy of the teachers who educate the next generation to hate Jews, it is the policy of the civic officials who name parks, playing fields and schools after mass murderers, it is, most inconceivably of all, the pride of parents who exude fervent approval of the murderous acts perpetrated by their own, dead children.

This is not a cycle of violence. It is Israelis struggling to find new, just ways to save their civilians from incessant attempts to annihilate them as individuals and as a people. It is a nation under siege, forced literally to erect a wall to protect its people, an act that itself has resulted not in global empathy or understanding for the 60-year siege Israelis have endured, just more frenzied baying for Jewish blood.

Israel is a country that employs surgical precision in targeting enemy combatants, endangering its own soldiers and civilians in an effort to protect innocent Palestinians. For this compassion, Israel is rewarded with global condemnation when their precision attacks kill children placed directly in harm's way as human shields because Palestinians – some of them, at least – care more about a PR war than about the lives, safety or squandered potential of their children.

But none of this is news. For anyone interested in the truth underlying this conflict, it has been clear since 2001 at the latest. Repeating this litany of horror is probably of no consequence, since those who need to hear it, those who desperately need to understand the true root of this conflict, continue to insist that this base inhumanity is the result not of a monstrous and contagious Palestinian death fetish, but rather is a natural reaction to decades of Israeli oppression.

The reason this conflict continues is the simple refusal of the world community to see this for what it is and demand an end to the incitement of Palestinians by their political, religious and intellectual elites, which has been the fuse of this entire conflict.

The Palestinian leadership, which, with varying degrees of support from Arabs, Muslims and Euro-American "progressives," has successfully created the world's most flourishing death cult, somehow retains the goodwill and naive empathy of much of the world community. And, at the same time, the world community, large chunks of it at any rate, are convinced that this inhumanity that rains down upon the Jews is simple and deserved justice.

If the festivities and merriment that defined Palestinian reactions to last week's mass murders do not fundamentally shift the world community's view of this conflict and its causes, it may not be just the Jews whose existence is threatened, but that of the entire civilized world.

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