http://sarahhonig.com/2013/11/29/another-tack-bloodlust-and-lies/
A lot of astonishment mingled with shock was expressed in our midst when it emerged that it was a 16-year-old, from an Arab village near Jenin, who slit the throat of Eden Attias earlier this month. Eden was a rookie soldier, just a couple of years older than the teen who slew him while he napped on the bus that took him back from sick leave to boot camp.
The beautiful people just couldn’t get their sensitive heads around it. The cold-blooded knifer was just a boy, whose soul is assumed to be pure.
While most liberal sorts remained atypically tongue-tied, the few who at all regarded the slaughter as worthy of their didactic attention implied that our sins were what drove a mere youth to such hopeless desperation. There had to be a reason (one that clearly conformed to their logical constructs). Violence doesn’t spring from a psychosocial vacuum, they tell us.
The cover-story wasn’t late in coming. The underage butcher was merely avenging the incarceration of his cousins in Israel. The abiding impression is that the two are victims of the ruthless repression of Israeli occupation – prisoners of conscience, persecuted altruists and political-philosophers unjustly put behind bars.
This indeed was the theme replayed unremittingly in the Palestinian Authority’s controlled official propaganda organs – the press, the schools and the mosques. A new overnight icon and adulated role model was born.
So what if one terrorist cousin was duly convicted of a double-homicide and the other of multiple homicide attempts? Sooner or later they’ll be released – either as part of a lopsided swap or in the framework of goodwill gestures to entice implacable enemies to pose as indignant peace-makers in made-up negotiations. Indeed the16-year-old isn’t likely to grow old in durance vile.
Odds are that, after doing too little time, he too will be liberated to be triumphantly feted in Ramallah and jubilantly accorded a hero’s homecoming in Jenin.
Massacring Jews has long been glorified in Mahmoud Abbas’s fiefdom and no one – least of all Barack Obama, John Kerry and the screeching chorus of sanctimonious EU notables – have mumbled the slighted murmur of objection to the ongoing incitement and indoctrination.
But what resonates in every ear throughout the PA and the entire Arab/Muslim realm beyond is of paramount significance. Foremost it marks the core difference between us and them. It shows how malicious it is to judge Israel and its neighbors by inherently hypocritical double standards.
What tells us apart is our underlying culture of pluralism and tolerance versus their underlying culture of bloodlust and lies. To deny this is to willfully distort history and, no less willfully, to misrepresent the present.
Is it really only in the Israeli context that Arabs spill blood?
To confer credence on the false narrative that this region’s ills all began with Israel’s birth in 1948 or with its so-called occupation in 1967 is to recycle deceit – whether knowingly or stupidly.
Here a gruesome yet grossly underreported story from Syria becomes crucially relevant. A video posted on the Internet on the very day that young Eden was stabbed in his sleep, featured two members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) holding up a bearded man’s head before a cheering ecstatic throng in the Syrian city of Aleppo. It was yet another among numerous beheadings by the purported rebels, whom much of the free world celebrates as defenders of the “Arab Spring.”
Since international opinion has learned to live quite calmly with the Arab/Muslim penchant for decapitation, there was no cause for this clip to kick up undue commotion.
What would eventually be revealed as a case of macabre mistaken identity began at an Aleppo hospital, where a wounded man lay rambling incoherently. Somebody claimed he blurted out the names of Shiite holy men. Since Shiites constitute the military mainstay of despot Bashar Assad and his Alawite loyalists, nothing further was required to seal the fate of the semi-conscious patient.
