https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-717948
When 28-year-old Mousa Sarsour from the Kalkilya area of the Palestinian Authority bludgeoned to death 84-year-old Shulamit Rachel Ovadia in Holon on Tuesday evening, it took the Israel Police hours to determine that the killing of the married, mother-of-three was “nationalistically motivated.”
This euphemism for anti-Jewish terrorism was created to distinguish it from regular criminal violence.
Due to the current wave of the former, most Israelis assumed that Ovadia, who had been battered repeatedly with a steel pipe or other blunt object, was a random target of a terrorist out for Jewish blood. Security forces realized it, too, when they discovered that the perpetrator hadn’t even stolen the victim’s wallet.
After a night-long manhunt, the suspect, who was identified through CCTV footage, was found dead in the center of Tel Aviv. It turned out that he had hanged himself in an abandoned apartment building.
Due to the uncharacteristic nature of the attack – which involved suicide, but only after the fact – Israeli authorities are baffled. An investigation into Sarsour’s background doesn’t seem to have cleared up their confusion.
But it appears to be providing a few go-to excuses for their inability to have prevented the evil deed in the first place. Let’s start with the main one, gleaned from interrogations of Sarsour’s family members and acquaintances: that he suffered from mental health problems.
Naturally. Why else would someone described by one of his relatives as a “very shy and quiet person” prey on an elderly woman walking home from a nearby grocer after doing some Rosh Hashanah shopping?
