CAROLINE GLICK: IGNORING THE ELEPHANT
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Our-World-Ignoring-the-elephant-359675
Three Jewish boys were abducted by Palestinian terrorists while trying to catch a ride home from school Thursday night. And as far as the foreign press is concerned, it’s their own damned fault.
As Honest Reporting documented, everyone from The Guardian to CNN, to Sky News to the Christian Science Monitor blamed Eyal Yifrach, Gil-Ad Shaer and Naftali Frankel for their victimization.
The boys deserve whatever they get, according to the media, because they are Jews and Jews have no right to be located anywhere that the Palestinians demand be cleansed of Jewish presence. And the Palestinians demand that Gush Etzion be emptied of Jews. So the boys, who dared to be located in Gush Etzion, had it coming.
And the blame doesn’t end with the victims. In trying to rescue them, the Israeli government is also committing an unpardonable crime – against Palestinian unity, no less.
According to The New York Times’ Israel bureau chief Jodi Rudoren, by searching for the boys, Israel has “further destabilized Israeli-Palestinian relations, and challenged the new Palestinian government’s ability to hold together disparate political factions and reunite the West Bank and Gaza after a seven-year split.”
As Seth Mandel wrote in Commentary, “If the unity government can survive only by being permitted to carry out terrorism against Israel without response or consequences, it is not so much a government as a sadistic terrorist gang.”
Mandel understated the problem. There is no conditionality. The Palestinian government is “a sadistic terrorist gang.” “The disparate political factions,” Rudoren was referring to are Fatah and Hamas.
Hamas, as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said, kidnapped the teenagers. Hamas is a jihadist movement recognized by the US State Department and the EU as a foreign terrorist organization.
Its declared goal is the genocide of world Jewry. And to advance its aim, it has murdered Jews, and incited, trained and indoctrinated Palestinians to murder Jews every single day since it was founded in 1988.
As for Fatah, since Frankel, Shaer and Yifrach were taken on Thursday night, Fatah has glorified and celebrated their capture on its official Facebook page and its official newspaper. Fatah’s Facebook page depicted the boys as rats, reeled in by a fishing pole.
The Palestinian Authority’s daily newspaper Al Hayat al Jadidapublished a mock World Cup logo in which three hands held three people who held their hands up in surrender.
And Fatah activists posted a revealing directive on Facebook after the boys were abducted.
No, Abbas’s “moderate” faction of the Palestinian unity government, so energetically supported by the US, the EU and the western media, did not call for the public to quit celebrating the abduction. Nor did it condemn the brutal assault.
The Fatah activists called for shopkeepers in the vicinity of the kidnapping to destroy any footage their security cameras filmed in the 24 hours following the operation to prevent the IDF from seizing the footage and using it in its efforts to locate the boys.
That makes Fatah an accessory after the fact to the attack. And yes, that means that the PA – which is comprised of Fatah and Hamas – is in fact one great big terrorist organization.
When Rudoren and her colleagues in the media look in the mirror, they don’t see themselves as enablers of murderers and champions of terrorists.
They see themselves as right-minded people who seek peace.
The same of course goes for the EU, which celebrated the formation of the Fatah-Hamas unity government, and has so far refused to condemn the kidnapping.
It also goes for the Obama administration which raced the EU to recognize the Fatah-Hamas government and promised that the US would continue funding the PA in breach of the letter of US law.
They all say they just want peace, for the betterment of all.
Taking them at their word, it is mystifying why they are so unconcerned with the behavior of Palestinian leaders.
All the two-state champions view PA President and Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas as either the head of a state or as the head of a state-in-the-making. And as such, they perceive him as someone who represents the Palestinians, and as Rudoren wrote, someone who is unifying “disparate political factions and reunit[ing] the West Bank and Gaza after a seven-year split.”
Abbas himself encourages this view by among other things presenting himself as the “President of Palestine,” by signing international agreements for the “State of Palestine” and by demanding that the world community pressure Israel to submit to his territorial and political demands for the benefit of “Palestine.”
Yet when Israel does what he supposedly wants, and holds him responsible, as the head of the Palestinian government, for the abduction of its children by his coalition partner, Abbas cries foul and says Israel has no right to hold him responsible.
Rather than demand that Abbas take the responsibility he claims to carry, and convince his coalition partner to return the children they stole, the two-stater peaceniks blame Israel. And the kidnapped boys.
Maybe there is something else going on here.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but perhaps the media and the governments championing Palestinian unity are less motivated by geopolitical concerns than they would have us believe? In one of those ironic coincidences that happens every so often when events converge to expose patterns and relations between seemingly unrelated events, in the two weeks before the Palestinians abducted Yifrach, Shaer and Frankel, the American Jewish community discovered that the object of the largesse of many an American Jewish patron of the arts – New York’s Metropolitan Opera – has gone full-on anti-Semitic.
In its fall line-up, the Met will produce the acclaimed-by- anti-Semites opera, The Death of Klinghoffer. Not only will they stage the show at Lincoln Center, the Met is going to broadcast it through its HD broadcast program to 2,000 theaters in 66 countries reaching a potential audience of millions.
The Death of Klinghoffer romanticizes the lives and times of the PLO terrorists who hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise liner in 1985 and murdered wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old Jewish American.
Among its other catchy tunes, the soon-to-be-seenworldwide opera includes this snappy ditty: “Wherever poor men – Are gathered they can – Find Jews getting fat – You know how to cheat – The simple, exploit – The virgin, pollute – Where you have exploited – Defame those you cheated – And break your own law – With idolatry.”
Ah, the arts. Unfortunately, the Met isn’t operating in isolation.
Throughout elite circles in the US, opinion is moving in an aggressively anti-Jewish direction.
University administrators and professors routinely side with anti-Semitic leftist and Muslim activists against their Jewish victims.
And led by the Presbyterian Church, mainline Protestant churches, as well as growing numbers of Evangelical churches are becoming openly hostile to Israel and the very notion of Jewish rights, including human rights.
The American elite are playing catchup with their European counterparts.
Under the guiding hand but blind eye of Europe’s elites, over the past 20 years anti-Semitism has become endemic in the political systems of EU member states as well as in the EU bureaucracy. Jew hatred serves as the one sentiment that unites leftists, rightists and Muslims.
And in Europe today, anti-Semitism doesn’t merely serve to justify Palestinian violence against Israelis. It also empowers Muslim Jew haters to believe that they can attack Jews violently with impunity on the streets of Europe. Over the past week alone, Jews in Paris were subjected to four violent attacks. Jewish teenage boys were chased by a man wielding ax. Other teenagers were sprayed with tear gas. Another Jewish teenage boy was tasered. And on Sunday, two men approached a synagogue while shooting a submachine gun and a handgun.
Outside the Jewish media, the events were barely reported. This, but a few weeks after the Belgian government refused to acknowledge that the massacre of four people at the Jewish museum in Brussels by a French jihadi was an anti-Semitic assault.
Jewish teenagers are kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists in Israel, and it’s their fault.
A old, handicapped Jewish man was thrown over the deck of a cruise ship, and America’s premier opera house says it’s art. Jewish teenagers are violently assaulted on the streets of Europe, and Europe yawns. There is a pattern here. And it has nothing to do with peace.
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