RUTHFULLY YOURS

Israeli civilians suffered yet another horrific attack on January 21^st by a jihadist, whom Hamas described as “heroic.” This latest act of terror occurred on a bus in central Tel Aviv, where nine people were stabbed. Four of them were seriously wounded. The assailant is in Israeli police custody after trying to flee the scene. Palestinians on social media celebrated the attack with hashtag #JeSuisCouteau “I am a knife,” in a cruel twisting of the worldwide expression of support for the victims of the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo magazine headquarters earlier this month – “Je suis Charlie.”

In recent months, jihadists affiliated with or supported by Hamas have killed about a dozen people, including an infant, by running them over with their cars, shooting them or stabbing them to death. These attacks included an invasion by two Palestinian thugs about two months ago at a synagogue in West Jerusalem during morning prayers. The Palestinians were armed with cleavers, knives and a gun, which they used to murder four Jewish worshippers in cold blood.

Just as it did in response to the bus stabbings, Hamas praised the cowardly synagogue attack as a “heroic” act. But Hamas was not alone. Shortly after the synagogue attack, Palestinian Authority President Abbas’s advisor and Fatah Central Committee member Sultan Abu Al-Einein praised the jihadists killers’ use of “quality weapons… the wheels of your cars, your axes and kitchen knives… because [they are  being used] according to Allah’s will.” Abbas’s pro-forma condemnation of the synagogue murders was belied by his party Fatah’s Facebook page glorifying the “heroic” use of ordinary objects as instruments of death against Jews.

For Hamas and its allies, “heroic” acts mean genocide committed against innocent Jews – any Jews, including babies and worshippers praying in their sacred sanctuary. Indeed, genocide against Jews is enshrined in Hamas’s founding charter, which remains in effect to this day. Palestinian Media Watch exposed just last week a video produced by Hamas’s Islamic Bloc at Al-Quds University depicting the shooting and stabbing of Jews praying. Expect another video shortly that depicts Jewish passengers on a bus being stabbed, with skull caps on the floor covered with blood as occurred in the wake of the Tel Aviv bus attack.

Hamas and Fatah leaders propagandize that the cowardly murders of innocent Jewish civilians are really nothing more than justifiable acts of resistance in a “popular” war against Israeli foreign occupation. For example, Izzat Risheq, a Hamas leader residing in Qatar, the terrorist-sponsoring gulf state that helps finance jihad throughout the Middle East, tweeted that the latest bus stabbings were a “natural response to the occupation and its terrorist crimes against our people.”

Sadly, neither President Obama nor most European leaders immediately condemned such vicious lies. They see no connection between the relentless Palestinian jihadist killings of Israeli civilians and the jihadist murders of 17 French citizens in Paris, including 4 Jews, or the murders of so many other civilians around the world by jihadists. Israel is a special case, they reason, because it is embroiled in a conflict over territories and the nationalist aspirations of the Palestinian people who are resisting Israeli occupation of their land. In other words, they have bought the Palestinians’ false narrative of victimhood hook, line and sinker.

For its part, Hamas’s leadership tried to reinforce this false distinction by distancing itself from the Islamist gunmen who carried out the Paris massacre at the Charlie Hebdo magazine headquarters. In an official statement issued in French that reeks of hypocrisy, they said there was no “justification for killing innocents.” Hamas then condemned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “helpless attempts” to draw parallels between “the resistance of our people from one side and the terrorism across the world in the other side.”

Despite its pitiful effort to appear sympathetic to certain victims of the Paris attacks (not, however, mentioning the killing of the four French Jews at a kosher supermarket), the true face of Hamas appeared on its “Al-Rasalah” Facebook page. Under photographs posted of the French jihadist killers, a caption declared: “The shahidim [martyrs] who were dispatched by God, the heroes of the raid in Paris.”

Jimmy Carter, who said last year that Hamas deserves “legitimacy as a political actor,” made a connection in his own perverse way between the Paris massacres and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He accepted at face value the rationale offered by the French jihadist who killed the Jews in the kosher supermarket, Amedy Coulibaly, that he wanted to defend the Palestinians.

“Well, one of the origins for it is the Palestinian problem. And this aggravates people who are affiliated in any way with the Arab people who live in the West Bank and Gaza, what they are doing now — what’s being done to them. So I think that’s part of it,” Carter told comedian Jon Stewart. Fittingly, Carter was appearing on Comedy Central, since it is hard to take anything he says seriously.

The one world leader who should be taken seriously, because his country is under the constant threat of jihad, is Prime Minister Netanyahu. He said after the Paris massacres that “if we ignore the true root of the problem, if we ignore the fact that extremist Islamic terrorism seeks to exterminate Western civilization as a whole, including the Jewish People, if we ignore this – what we are now seeing in Paris will be only the beginning. These are not frightening words or prophecies of rage, this is the simple reality and the time has come to recognize it.”

After the most recent stabbings on the Tel Aviv bus, Prime Minister Netanyahu noted Hamas’s praise of the terrorist act and said: “The same terror tries to hurt us in Paris, Brussels and everywhere.”

President Obama had a chance in his State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress on January 20^th to finally acknowledge the ideological source of the vast majority of terrorist acts committed globally, including in Israel, France and the United States – Islamic jihad. True to form, he failed to do so, as he has done so many times before. He did not even mention al Qaeda in his State of the Union speech.

Next month, Prime Minister Netanyahu will have the opportunity to tell a special joint session of Congress the truth about the threat of global jihad to freedom that President Obama failed to acknowledge, thanks to an invitation that Speaker John Boehner extended to Mr. Netanyahu. The president and his fellow Islamic jihad deniers would do well to listen for a change.