RUTHFULLY YOURS

In 1929, 86 years ago, for the Holiday of Shavuot-Pentecost, Levin Kipnis wrote the early Hebrew song ‘Baskets on our shoulders,’ an Israeli children’s song that is sung to date.

Yedidya Admon wrote the tune to the song and many artists recorded it, among them the singer Yaffa Yarkoni.

The poet’s song version is as follows:

Baskets on our heads,
Our heads are decorated,
From all corners of the land we arrived,
We brought the first fruits.
From Yehuda-Judea, Yehuda, from Shomron-Samaria,
From the valley, from the Gallil-Galilee –
Clear the road for us,
Our first fruits with us,
Bang, bang the drum and bang the flute!
About Levin Kipnis

Levin Kipnis, who lived between 1894-1990, was an Israeli children’s story writer and a poet, who wrote mostly in Hebrew and also in Yiddish, and in 1978 became Israel’s Prize Laureate for children’s literature.

It’s hard to find any silver lining in a situation where Palestinians are perpetrating multiple stabbing attacks against Jews every day, and most of the “international community” is siding with the perpetrators. Yet this dismal situation may finally have produced something Israel desperately needs: An Israeli Arab political leader who represents his community’s sane majority. The 65 percent who are proud to be Israeli, the 55 percent who identify with the Israeli flag, the ones who genuinely want to live in peace with their Jewish neighbors.

For decades, Israeli Arab leadership at the national level has been an unmitigated disaster. The community’s current Knesset members, elected on a joint ticket called the Joint Arab List, span the gamut from the “moderate” Ayman Odeh to the “firebrand” Hanin Zoabi, to borrow the media’s favorite misnomers. The former merely refuses to condemn Palestinian terror, saying, “I cannot tell the nation how to struggle … I do not put red lines on the Arab Palestinian nation.” The latter may face criminal investigation for actively inciting it, having allegedly told a Hamas publication that the current terror needs more “national support,” because “If individual attacks continue without national support, they will be extinguished within the next several days, and therefore hundreds of thousands are needed to start a real intifada.” In between are MKs who spew a wide variety of anti-Israel libels; my personal favorite was Ahmed Tibi’s 2014 op-ed in The Hill claiming that Israeli Arabs are subject to Jim Crow treatment – signed, without a trace of irony, by his then-title of deputy speaker of the Knesset.

The Palestinian terror wave that began on October 1 struck again on Sunday evening with an attack at the bus station in Beersheva, my town. Monday, at the time of writing, has been quiet so far, but it’s certainly too soon to say whether the wave is subsiding.

It’s not too soon, though, to point out some things that already emerge from this latest onslaught. They are not new phenomena. They indicate, though, that even as Israel keeps making great strides in various fields that benefit humanity (water use and conservation is one of the most dramatic), and keeps upgrading its ties with important countries (lately, particularly, India), it remains a country that is subjected to special, malign treatment.

Authorities insist on describing predators only as “Asian”. In Banbury, Birmingham, Blackburn, Bristol, Burnley, Cambridge, Carlisle, Derby, Leeds, London, Manchester, Oldham, Oxford, Peterborough, Preston, Rochdale, Rotherham, Sheffield and Telford locals need no translation
A few weeks ago a Muslim sex gang was convicted at the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court, of raping a girl when she was under sixteen and arranging for another sixty men to do the same. The offences occurred in the quiet market town of Aylesbury. It is just the latest in a long series of trials for rape and sex attacks on under-age English girls by Muslim gangs in town after town right across the country including Banbury, Birmingham, Blackburn, Bristol, Burnley, Cambridge, Carlisle, Derby, Leeds, London, Manchester, Middlesbrough, Oldham, Oxford, Peterborough, Preston, Rochdale, Rotherham, Sheffield and Telford. The victims of these horrible sex crimes were usually vulnerable young girls without families to protect them. More trials are currently taking place in Newcastle and Manchester. The gangs were often traffickers who once they had gained control over a girl would pass her around as a sex-object so that as many of their fellow Muslims as possible could enjoy her.

What is striking is that whenever a group of Muslims commits a crime of this kind, the press and broadcasters go out of their way to avoid identifying the religion of the malefactors. They are even less willing to suggest any causal connection between these acts and the central practices of that religion, the connection that makes it both ethical and necessary to identify and stress the faith of the perpetrators.

Moral Abdication in the Middle East The West has developed a dangerous concern for ‘proportionality.’
In the current epidemic of Palestinian violence, scores of Arab youths are attacking, supposedly spontaneously, Israeli citizens with knives. Apparently, edged weapons have more Koranic authority, and, in the sense of media spectacle, they provide greater splashes of blood. Thus the attacker is regularly described as “unarmed” and a victim when he is “disproportionately” stopped by bullets.

The Obama State Department has condemned the use of “excessive” Israeli force in response to Palestinian terrorism. John Kirby, the hapless State Department spokesman, blamed “both” sides for terrorism, and the president himself called on attackers and their victims to “tamp down the violence.”

In short, the present U.S. government — which is subsidizing the Palestinians to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year — is incapable of distinguishing those who employ terrorist violence from the victims against whom the terrorism is directed. But why is the Obama administration — which can apparently distinguish those who send out drones from those who are blown up by them on the suspicion of employing terrorist violence — morally incapable of calling out Palestinian violence? After all, in the American case, we blow away suspects whom we think are likely terrorists; in the Israeli instance, they shoot or arrest those who have clearly just committed a terrorist act.