We don’t see masses of people dancing in the streets, celebrating the murders with gifts and sweets, and naming public facilities, events, and streets in honor of the murderers. From time to time we see news stories in the west about crimes committed by murderous psychopaths with similar results. Not as “collateral damage,” in that detestable military euphemism, but calculatedly, deliberately, and gleefully.īut there is something perhaps even more horrifying. What is horrifying to us in the west, is the up-close and personal nature of the murders, and the deliberate targeting of helpless civilians. We can’t, or we’d be paralyzed by conscience. We don’t spend a lot of time contemplating the women and children who died when they rained hell on them from the air. The allied bomber pilots and crews who smashed the Third Reich and imperial Japan are rightly regarded as heroes. (However, the president has generally been getting a pass in the media Israel doesn’t get.) Some of them on President Obama’s orders, some of them by Israeli firepower. Plenty of parents and children have been killed in their homes over the past century, by bombs dropped from aircraft, artillery fire, or Predator drone attacks. President Obama released a statement, “There is no possible justification for the killing of parents and children in their home,” which seems eerily detached. The violence feared does not include beheading four-month-old babies though. There are fears there could be more violence.” The BBC reported, “On Sunday some settlers set fire to Palestinian cars and attacked Palestinian homes in revenge. Examples include treatment of the story in the New York Times, CNN, and the BBC.Īfter looking over the offending sites, in my judgement their coverage does seem to lean a certain way, but you can also find things that don’t seem to get mentioned in conservative Israeli-supporting media. Supporters of Israel found fault in much of the media coverage. Reaction in the West has ranged from outraged among supporters of Israel, to muted among supporters of the Palestinians. This seems a frail reed in light of reports of people celebrating and handing out sweets in Rafah. Other Palestinian sources claimed it was an Israeli set-up. We also know Palestinian leaders have a history of issuing statements for the Western media contradicted by statements issued for home consumption in the Arabic-language press. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas officially condemned the murders as, “immoral and inhuman” according to the BBC news. Palestinian response has been contradictory. Reportedly, bloody footprints were found leading to the nearby Palestinian village of Rafah. The neighbor got his gun and accompanied her into the house to find Yishai shaking the bodies of his parents, begging them to get up. The couple’s daughter Tamar, 12, returned home from spending Shabbat with friends, found something suspicious outside the house and roused a neighbor. Two boys, Roi, 8, and Yishai, 2, were somehow overlooked. It subsequently emerged the baby had been beheaded. The victims were stabbed in the heart and had their throats cut. The facts as they have emerged so far are these: in the West Bank Israeli village of Itamar last week, two men broke into the house of the Fogel family and murdered Udi Fogel, 36, his wife Ruth, 35, their sons Yoav, 11, Elad, 4, and their four-month-old baby girl Hadas. But as I’ve said, you know you’re being objective when everybody likes you – or everybody hates you. I may be alone in this, and it’s not likely to win me any popularity contests. I have deliberately waited to comment on the Itamar Massacre until I had gained enough control over myself to do so with a certain degree of objective detachment. And it is this that happens if you lose.” Then Jean de Rye, an aged knight of Burgundy who had been sore wounded in the battle, rode up to the group of young knights and said: ‘Are ye maidens with your downcast eyes? Look well upon it. Some could not look upon it and some could not speak and they held themselves apart from the others who were cutting down the prisoners at My Lord’s orders, for the prisoners were a body too numerous to be guarded by those of us who were left. “There were young knights among them who had never been present at a stricken field.
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