RUTHFULLY YOURS

Ms. Hotovley is deputy foreign minister of Israel.

Palestinian leaders have created a culture of death that is motivating the latest violent terrorism.

The latest surge of Palestinian terror attacks against Israelis has come in the immediate wake of explicit calls by the Palestinian leadership to “spill blood.” This well-orchestrated campaign of violence follows many years in which Palestinian children have been taught to idolize the murder of Jews as a sacred value and to regard their own death in this “jihad” as the pinnacle of their aspirations.

Such violence has deep roots. It goes back to the rampages at the behest of Haj Amin al-Husseini, a Muslim activist and at one point grand mufti of Jerusalem, in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. It continued with the fedayeen Palestinian militants in the 1950s and ’60s, and evolved into the terrorism of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Fatah under Yasser Arafat and now Mahmoud Abbas. Anyone who claims that Palestinian terror against Jews dates only to 1967, or is a response to Israeli settlements, should become more informed of the conflict’s history.

Yet the apathy shown by the international community to the death-culture fostered by Palestinian elites, and the unbalanced manner in which subsequent violence is often treated by the international media—as if there is any kind of symmetry between terrorists and their victims—is doing long-term, and possibly irrevocable, harm to generations of Palestinians.

A few recent examples underscore the depth of the problem.

Mr. Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, said the following on Palestinian television on Sept. 16: “We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem. This is pure blood, clean blood, blood on its way to Allah. With the help of Allah, every martyr will be in heaven, and every wounded will get his reward.”

A looters’ economy ultimately cannibalizes itself. When there is no more left to loot, no one left to loot, it collapses, implodes, and brings down with it whatever is left of productivity and civilized society.

As the term economy is understood to be a system of trade – a barter system, or laissez-faire, or a mixed economy in which the freedom to trade and produce hampered, saddled and skewed by government controls and regulations, the notion of an economy founded on altruism is, like an “Islamic economy,” an oxymoron.

The Gatestone Institute carried a revealing article about the state of Sweden on October 17th, Ingrid Carlqvust’s “Sweden Close to Collapse.” She began the article with:

Sweden is fast approaching a complete collapse. More and more municipalities are raising the alarm that if the migrants keep coming at this pace, the government can no longer guarantee normal service to its citizens. In addition, ominous statements from government officials have left Swedes in fear of what tomorrow may bring. If the migrant wave keeps coming, in 10-15 years, Swedes will be a minority in their own country.

At a press conference October 9, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven said that Sweden is in a state of crisis. However, when asked to clarify what he meant by this, Löfven was unable to produce a single coherent sentence.

Three ministers appeared by the Prime Minister’s side at the hastily summoned press conference, which came on the heels of an extraordinary government meeting. The purpose of the press conference seems to have been to convey two messages:

To explain to the world and the Swedish people that Sweden is facing “one of the largest humanitarian efforts in Swedish history.”
That there is no more housing available, and migrants should be prepared to live in tents.

During the question period after the ministers’ speeches, journalist Tomas Ramberg of Ekot Public Radio asked: “You say that Sweden is preparing for a crisis situation, what do you mean by those dramatic words?”

The medical team did not go out to provide treatment to the wounded

The media has tried to emphasize the role of Muslim medical personnel in treating Jewish victims some of the latest Muslim terror attacks.

The reality however is much less politically correct.

Health Minister Ya’akov Litzman (United Torah Judaism) ordered an investigation on Friday to check suspicions that Arab medical staff at a clinic in Jerusalem’s Old City did not go out to help Jewish victims, who were stabbed right next to the clinic.

The incident in question is the brutal murder of Aharon Banita Bennett (21) and Rabbi Nehemia Lavi (41), which took place on Hagai Street on October 3. Bennett’s wife was seriously wounded and his two-year-old son was lightly wounded in the Arab terrorist attack.

While Bennett’s wife’s condition has since improved, it is likely that immediate medical treatment could have lessened the seriousness of her wounds and possibly saved the life of her husband and of Rabbi Lavi, who was stabbed as he came to try and save the young couple and their son.

Never in our lifetime, not even during World War II, have the people of Planet Earth seen the potential for more human misery than they are now witness to. In Europe, the black peoples of Africa and the Muslims of the Middle East, Pakistan, and Afghanistan… many of them escaping war and starvation, others brutal savages intent upon spreading Islamic extremism… stream across the international frontiers of Britain, France, Germany, and other European countries.

All across the Middle East and Africa, we see daily reports of what passes for justice in their brutal primitive cultures. We see gang rapes administered as punishment; we see ritual beheadings of enemy captives; we see women, some as young as eight or nine years of age, kidnapped and sold into sex slavery; we see rape victims buried up to their necks and stoned to death; we see captured soldiers doused with gasoline and publicly burned to death; and we see prisoners locked in steel cages and submerged in tanks of water. In short, we are now witness to the most unimaginable variety of human cruelty and depravity at the hands of radical Islamists.

In Israel, we see young Palestinian Arabs roaming the streets of Jerusalem, attacking and stabbing Israeli pedestrians at random. We see Palestinians driving automobiles onto sidewalks, running down Israelis waiting at bus stops. And when Israeli police are attacked with knives and are shot to death, Obama administration officials charge the Israelis with “overreacting.”

SARAH HONIG

The kneejerk response in Israel’s Arab sector is to declare general strikes to underscore what is hyped as “popular anger.”

The latest expression of such “anger” took place last week when throughout Israel’s Arab communities businesses shut down for a day. Doubtless many were forced to do so but the truth is that many others were willingly swept up in the well-orchestrated volatility.

What did they aim to achieve? Whom did they aim to hurt?

Surely they realized that they are only shooting themselves in the foot. Their strikes simply and serially fail to awe the mystified Jewish majority. The only effect strikes have, if any, is to hone even further the already deeply ingrained impression that this country’s Arabs side unequivocally with Israel’s existential and implacable foes.

To resort to extreme understatement, this in no way contributes to the cause of coexistence.

Hot on the heels of a spate attacks against Jewish civilians in nearly every nook of this country, the Arab general strike invariably helped establish an association – whether subliminal or conscious – between Arab businessmen and the recurrent stabbings, shootings, fire-bombings and rock-throwing.