Monday, March 14, 2011

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

10 comments:

Ronbo said...

"Radicalized Muslims?"

The murderers of the Fogel family were simply MUSLIMS and "righteous men" by the tenets of their perverted collectivist religion which requires the slavery or killing of anyone who will not convert to Islam.

These are the days of the Third Great Jihad by Islam against the West, which if it is to survive, must counter attack in a Third World War aimed at the complete destruction of Islam.

Victory or death - the only two options in the battle of Western Civilization and Islamic Barbarism.

BillD said...

If there was ever an argument for the neutron bomb...

Ronbo said...

@Bill D:

Yes, I think if you talk to the average American, he or she would tell you that ISLAM is the main threat to the West and that ruthless measures are needed to throw it back to the shadows.

I say this time, the West must do MORE than simply beat off yet another Jihad offensive - We must follow Islam back to the fever swamps of Asia and Africa where it breeds like rats in a sewer and terminate it with extreme prejudice.

Yes, nuclear weapons would be quite helpful in the New Crusade: Smash their cities, blow Mecca and Medina off the map, execute their leaders and put the 57 Muslim countries of the world under hard military occupations like we did Germany, Japan and Italy after WW II.

And remember this: The victors get to write the history books and make the movies: Later generations will consider WW III as reasonable, necessary and heroic as the Second World War.

Alan Caruba said...

#BillD and Ronbo:
You are talking about 1.3 BILLION Muslims and that is genocide on a scale that is appalling. It is fundamentally immoral.

I can understand your anger and frustration, but let's not end up like the Communists who wiped out millions in order to build their insance idea of a perfect society.

TexasFred said...

Retaliation...

50 to 1, maybe 100 to 1... It's like the guy said in the movie The Untouchables, "They pull a knife, YOU pull a gun, they send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of theirs to the morgue..."

They want to find virgins, give the sorry bastards a chance to find out how wrong and misled they have been..

Ronbo said...

@Alan:

I don't think self defense against over a billion potential murderers is genocide, but it is TOTAL WAR on the level of the Second World War.

I would remind you that Islam declared this TOTAL WAR on America on September 11, 2001 - As my alter ego Rambo would say, "They Drew First Blood."

Therefore, the gauntlet has been thrown at our feet. I say let us pick up the bloody glove and give Islam the same type of ruthless and destructive war we gave the Axis Powers in WW II.

Unknown said...

I don't think they were killed for being Jews. I think they were killed for occupying someone else's land.

The adults get no sympathy from me. The kids do deserve sympathy, born to idiotic parents. But if Jews, Gentiles, or chimpanzees came in and threw me out of my home, I'd do exactly the same thing.

I don't know how the hell you ever got a column on the lewrockwell.com website.

Alan Caruba said...

@Carter: And I think you're full of crap.

The Jews of today are living where the Jews of yesterday lived 3,500 years ago.

They didn't "occupy" it because they have an ancient deed to it. Read your Old Testament.

The Arabs in that same land were not a state, but rather regarded themselves as living in southern Syria. They lived there because it had been conquered in war by Suliman. The Jews, beset by modern wars, took it back.

BillD said...

Of course you are right, Alan, and I knew it when I posted my comment. The challenge always is to resist evil in a civilized way. I'm grateful that the responsibility is not directly mine.

BillD said...

In thinking about this Palestinian-Israeli conflict, I reflect on the Irish division.

Sooner or later, you have to accept a fait accompli, distasteful though it may be.