RUTHFULLY YOURS

The French intent to recognize Palestinian statehood in Judea & Samaria, if the Israel-Palestinian negotiations fail, reflects the French policy of appeasing Palestinian terrorism (since the 1960s) and Islamic terrorism (since 1978). Rather than sheltering France from terrorism, France’s appeasement policy – more than any other European country – has fueled anti-French and anti-Western terrorism. French policy has rewarded the 100-year-old systematic Palestinian hate-education, incitement and terrorism. It prejudges the outcome of negotiations and minimizes Palestinian incentive to negotiate.

While the November 13, 2015, and the January 7, 2015, combined slaughter of 147 people in Paris were committed by Islamic terrorists, much of the responsibility for enticing these heinous acts lies at the doorstep of French policy-makers, who have appeased Palestinian and Islamic terrorists, with the former facilitating the penetration of Europe for the latter.

Since the 1960s, France has tolerated the presence, on French soil, of Palestinian terror organizations, operationally, logistically and diplomatically. Notwithstanding – and due to – French hospitality and support of pro-Palestinian proposals at the UN General Assembly and Security Council, many acts of terrorism against French, Arab, American and Israeli citizens have occurred on the French mainland: the July 31, 1975 PLO hostage-taking at Iraq’s Embassy in Paris, the April 3, 1982 murder of an Israeli diplomat, the August 9, 1982 murder of six patrons (including two Americans) at the Chez-Goldberg Restaurant, etc.

This week, a beautiful young Israeli woman lost her life serving her country. Hadar Cohen, the 19-year-old heroine killed in the line of Border Police duty, died from wounds she sustained in a terrorist attack on Wednesday afternoon. Two weeks earlier, her parents had beamed with pride at the swearing-in ceremony that marked the successful completion of her basic training. On Thursday, they were weeping over her freshly dug grave at a military cemetery.

In spite of being new to the job — made particularly daunting by the surge in Palestinian terrorism that has swept the Jewish state since September — Hadar acted both professionally and swiftly. Not only did she literally and figuratively take a bullet for her unit and the innocent Israeli civilians whom the three terrorists had come to slaughter with knives, guns and pipe bombs, but she also managed to shoot at them in the process. It was this, apparently, that saved a fellow female Border Police officer, who was wounded in the attack, from certain death.

Though Hadar will be remembered for her special bravery, her story is not unique. It is the common course that the life of her peers takes after high school. We only hear about those individuals who become unwittingly famous for being buried before getting a chance at life, enabling countless civilians to go about their business in peace.

Comparing this late-teen-early-adulthood reality with that of Hadar’s American counterparts requires a stretch of the imagination and a sense of satire. Take the case of Yale University student Jencey Paz, whose own fame was gained through having her feelings hurt by an associate master at her college. Right around the time when Hadar was going over a checklist of items she’d need to pack before entering the IDF, Jencey was gearing up for Halloween.

The United Nations played the Holocaust game last week so it could play another lethal game this week. The ruse consists of making a big deal about the gas chambers for Jews back then, while stoking the fires of anti-Semitism burning right now.

On January 31, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon penned a New York Times op-ed to say at one and the same time that “people will always resist occupation” and “nothing excuses terrorism.” That follows a statement he gave to the Security Council on January 26, in which he said “Palestinian frustration is growing” and “it is human nature to react to occupation, which often serves as an incubator of hate and extremism.”

Reaction to the claim that it is human nature to stab pregnant women and mothers in front of their children – as Palestinians had done the week before – has been unanimous across the Israeli political spectrum. In the words of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on January 26: “The secretary-general’s remarks give a tailwind to terrorism.”

Nevertheless, the spokesman of the secretary-general doubled down in a press briefing on January 27 with these words: “Absolutely nothing justifies terrorism. . . . At the same time, if we want to see an end to this violence . . . we must address the root causes, the underlying frustrations.”

In short, for the United Nations, nothing justifies terrorism except Palestinian frustration.

It is hardly a secret that the UN agenda is to find reasons for treating the Jewish state differently – notwithstanding the UN Charter’s promise of equality for nations large and small. The settlements bandwagon is one of many.

Since 2010, members of the anti-Israel left have denounced any mention of the Jewish state’s open-minded attitude toward homosexuals as “pinkwashing”: i.e., a cover for Israel’s alleged crimes against the Palestinians. To make sense of this bizarre accusation, Jamie Palmer cites George Orwell’s analysis of the leftist intellectuals of his own day whose blind devotion to Communism led them to defend Joseph Stalin:

“Last week, the neologism ‘pinkwashing’ made an unwelcome return to news headlines. On Friday January 22, protesters bearing placards denouncing Israel disrupted an event organized by the National LGBTQ Task Force as part of its Creating Change conference in Chicago. The protesters, it seems, were upset by the involvement of an Israeli LGBT organisation called Jerusalem Open House and a Jewish LGBT organization called A Wider Bridge that, the JTA reported, “seeks to build ties between gay communities in North America and Israel”.

Over at the Washington Post’s Volokh Conspiracy blog, law professor David Bernstein was flabbergasted. “Many participants,” he wrote, “describe the demonstration as both anti-Semitic and physically threatening (and the hotel felt obliged to call the police), but we can limit ourselves to the sheer craziness of radical LGBT activists shouting “free Palestine” and anti-Israel slogans to shut down an event involving an Israeli LGBT organization when Israel is a gay rights haven and the Palestinian territories, to say the least, are not.”

This was, as I hope to explain, to miss the point about what really irritates these people. And while I share Bernstein’s dismay, he needn’t have been shocked by their apparent perversity. It is only the most recent manifestation of a peculiar malady that has disproportionately afflicted the Left for decades.