Whoever carried out the horrible arson attack
that killed 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh and nearly burned his entire
family alive is a wild thorn, as Israelis like to call them. The
perpetrators are in no way connected to, or inspired by, the settler
movement, religious Zionism or the Israeli right wing in general.
Whoever says so is slandering, defaming and inciting, as the left is
wont to do.
Yigal Amir,
who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, was also a lone
wolf. The fact that right-wing politicians had whipped up a public
frenzy in the weeks before his killing, accusing Rabin of selling out
Israel to terrorists, or that rabbis were discussing and some even
sanctioning a religious sentence of death against Rabin, doesn’t mean
they were prodding Amir in any way. By claiming otherwise, the Israeli
left and their lackeys in the media only prove how low they are willing
to go in order to exploit a national tragedy for political gain.
The same is true of Baruch Goldstein, the
Brooklyn-born Kiryat Arba doctor who massacred 29 Muslim worshippers at
Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994. True, Goldstein was revered by
hundreds if not thousands and still commands sympathy and respect among
hardcore settlers and Kach-supporters, but let’s not forget that he was
savagely murdered for his beliefs by terrorist Palestinians at the
scene.
Goldstein, in any case, was a native-born American,
which renders him completely atypical. Baltimore-born Alan Goodman, who
stormed the Temple Mount in 1982 in order to liberate the Temple Mount,
killing two Palestinians in the process, is just as much your problem as
he is ours. Nahshon Walls, who shot a pregnant 25-year-old Palestinian
woman to death near Kiryat Arba in what he said was an act of revenge,
was Ohio-born and bred. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he was released
in less than 10 years and spent his last years surrounded by friends in
Tapuach who praise his good deeds to this very day.
And don’t forget Los Angeles’ own Yehuda Richter,
a disciple of Meir Kahane, who was a member of the radical group Terror
Against Terror (TNT, naturally), together with other friends he made
during summer camps in the Catskills. Richter was convicted of taking
part in a 1984 bus attack in which 6 Palestinians were injured. Now he
is a respected rabbi in the settlement Elon Moreh, but what does that
prove? That all Americans are terrorists?
And then there’s Yaakov Teitel,
originally of Florida and Virginia then of Shvut Rachel, an all-purpose
man-in-one terror machine who killed Palestinians, tried to poison a
village, bombed Christian churches, maimed Messianic Jews and planted the pipe bomb
that injured Professor Ze’ev Sternhell in 2008. Ironically, in a
chilling link to this week’s double tragedies, Teitel was later
re-arrested posting flyers in praise of the 2009 Tel Aviv gay center
shooting in which two people were killed - and just before he could
carry out a plot to fly a bomb-rigged toy plane into the Tel Aviv gay
parade. That job would be left to Yishai Schlissel, another Orthodox Jew
by pure coincidence, who murdered 16-year-old Shira Banki in Jerusalem last week and stabbed five others.
As for the rest, well, their singularity is almost self-evident: Yona Avrushmi,
who threw a grenade at a Peace Now demonstration in 1983, killing Emil
Grunzweig, was a fish out of water; Yisrael Lederman, who was convicted
for killing a Palestinian in 1978 and then for scalding MK Yael Dayan
with boiling tea, was an odd man out; David Ben Shimol, who fired an RPG
rocket at a bus, killing a Palestinian and injuring others, was an
alien aberration; Danny Eisenman of Ma'ale Adumim, who together with
others killed a Palestinian taxi driver in 1985 revenge for the killing
of an Israeli driver the previous day, was an exception who proved the
rule.
Don’t forget, one swallow does not a summer make,
nor does one terrorist – or even quite a few, for that matter -
necessarily create a pattern. What you see isn’t necessarily what you
get, and we can prove it.
Ami Popper, who killed seven Palestinians in May,
1990 near Rishon Letzion was atypical; Gur Hamel, a Breslav Hasid who
stoned an elderly Palestinian to death in 1998, was obviously a bit
deranged; the Hebron residents who went on a rampage in 2001 following
the killing of a Jewish baby were enraged, perhaps, but understandably
so. Eden Natan Zada of Tapuach killed four Arabs on a bus in Shfaram in
August, 2005 writing that “A Jew doesn’t expel another Jew”; Asher
Weisgan of Shvut Rachel murdered another four Palestinians that same
month near Shiloh: both had hoped to stop the Gaza disengagement, but
they could not have been inspired by settler leaders who described the
Gaza withdrawal as blasphemy that would lead to catastrophe. Perish the
thought.
The Jewish Underground that bombed Arab mayors in
1980, murdered three female students at the Islamic College in Hebron in
1983 and hoped to detonate the Temple Mount were a one-time fling. The
fact that they were all pardoned by President Chaim Herzog and are now
rabbis, educators, politicians, newspaper editors and other esteemed
members of society doesn’t necessarily mean their actions are condoned.
It could be simply be the remarkable rehabilitative powers of the
pristine air in Judea and Samaria.
The Lifta Gang, a Chabad-trained messianic group who
“were a step away from blowing up the Temple Mount” in 1984, as Nadav
Shragai wrote in his book "The Battle for the Temple Mount," were
absolute weirdos; The Bat Ayin Underground who wanted blow up a girls
school in East Jerusalem and who police suspected of killing seven
Palestinians may have lived in settlements, which is only
circumstantial, but were out of their effing minds, which is much more
pertinent; and the Revenge Unit that threw a grenade into the Butcher’s
Market in the Old City in 1992 were all disciples of Kach, which, you
will recall, is outlawed in Israel. When the Palestinians outlaw Hamas,
give us a call.
No one can doubt our disavowal of self-appointed
Price Tag vigilantes, whose motives are appreciated but who do more harm
than good. And everyone remembers the genuine outpourings of outrage
and vows of “never again" at the gruesome burning alive of Mohammed Abu Khdeir
in July 2014, though his ungrateful parents did say that the killing of
the baby Ali Dawabsheh in the village of Duma made them feel as if
their son had been murdered all over again.
Be that as it may, the fact that these and countless
other terrorist incidents- including scores of attacks in which people
were maimed and property was destroyed but no one was killed - were
carried out by Jewish Israelis who were either settlers, or Orthodox, or
right wing, or any combination thereof, doesn’t prove a thing.
Attaching significance to such a random though
admittedly overwhelmingly emphatic list is a time-tested leftist method
of casting aspersions on true Israel-loving patriots. The fact that a
Likud-led government has been in power throughout most of these years
also means nothing: there are many other problems that it hasn’t managed
to solve as well.
The accusations against the right are but a scare
tactic employed by supporters of the New Israel Fund and others of their
ilk in order to deflect attention away from their evil designs. The
fact that they have now enlisted President Rivlin in their campaign is
lamentable, but it won’t change a thing. They are out to harm the
settlements, which is like a knife through the heart of Israel itself.
NIF hides its sinister plans behind a thick cloak of
donations, activities and other supposedly innocuous programs
ostensibly devoted to the common good. Then they and the rest of the
left camouflage their true intentions by assiduously refraining from
engaging in any violence or murder or terrorism, either toward Arabs or
toward their fellow Jews. But Israelis won’t be taken in by a worn-out
canard based on some old-fashioned concept of “empirical evidence” that
shows that all Jewish terrorists come from the right. Instead of
succumbing to hypocritical calls for “soul-searching” - which is just
another self-absorbed liberal vanity anyway – we will fight them and
their Arab masters every step of the way, by whatever means are
necessary.
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