Five Dead Jews

By Alan Caruba

For the same reason it is difficult to comprehend what will surely be a large loss of life following the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan, it is hard to grasp that, halfway through the last century, when I was a child, Nazis killed six million Jews for being Jews.

The mind rejects such insanity. We recoil from such barbarity, but we can understand what it means when a family of five is slain in their beds while they slept. That is what happened to the Fogel family in their home last Friday in the West Bank settlement of Itamar. They were killed for being Jews.

The victims were Rabbi Udi Fogel, 36, who taught at the Itamar yeshiva; his wife, Ruth Fogel, 34. Yoav, age 11. Eldad, age 4. And tiny baby, Hadas. Eldad was stabbed in the heart. His baby sister had her throat cut. The others died in a similar fashion.

Their blood-soaked bodies were found by their sister, Tamar, age 12, when she returned home that evening and mercifully spared were Roi, age 8, and Yishai, age 2, as they slept in another room.

There is a fence around Itamar, but for whatever reason, it was scaled and when the guards, alerted by a motion detector, found no evidence of a breach, they assumed some animal had set it off. They were wrong.

The animals, the killers, were a team of Hamas murderers and, when word of the murders spread throughout Gaza, candy was given out to children there to celebrate.

This occurred in an Israel now regularly called an “apartheid” nation for seeking to defend itself against a people, the so-called Palestinians, who have refused to recognize its nationhood for more than sixty years. It is a nation isolated and under attack in the United Nations despite the fact that organization supposedly exists to peacefully resolve issues, not stoke the fires of hatred as it does.

News of the murders was given a tepid rebuke by Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad who denounced “violence by any quarter” without the specificity of naming Hamas.

In a phone call to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu made it clear that terrorism was not going to restructure the settlement map on the West Bank and, to back it up, Israel announced it would authorize the construction of 500 new homes in West Bank settlements, 100 for each of the murdered Fogels.

There is a particular irony in the murder of the Fogels. They had originally lived in Gaza and had moved to Itmar in 2007 when, under former Israeli PM Ariel Sharon, they were among the Israelis who were forcibly removed by their own nation in order to provide Palestinians a strip of land on which to build a state of their own.

Instead, the Palestinians used Gaza as a forward line of war to fire hundreds, if not thousands, of rockets into Israel. It took Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 to dampen their enthusiasm for that. By then, Hamas had driven the Palestinian Authority out of Gaza at gunpoint.

DEBKAfile, an Israeli news agency, noted that the attack was “the first of its kind in years. Hamas websites hailed the murder as ‘heroic’, without taking any responsibility.”

The murders come at a time when Rep. Peter King is holding congressional hearings on the threat of radicalized Muslims in America who pose a threat to our lives. He has been attacked for putting the spotlight on this threat despite the fact that we are now almost a decade passed 9/11 and there have been the Fort Hood murders, as well as a series of attacks, planned, foiled, and near misses, in the past decade.

The Israelis are not so naïve, so fearful to face the truth about Islam in general and the Palestinians in particular. They are not so politically correct they will not say words like “terrorism” or “Islamic jihad.” They are not led by idiots like Obama’s National Security advisor who thinks the Muslim Brotherhood is a “secular” organization.

Light a candle for the Fogels. Say a prayer for the Fogels. They are your family too.

© Alan Caruba, 2011