Telling it Like it Is! A Passionate Response to Toulouse.

Western Leaders and Thinkers Are Still Delusional

By: Rabbi YY Jacobson

There are no words which can describe the evil perpetrated by Mohammed Merah in Toulouse, on Monday morning, March 19th 2012.

Merah is the Islamic Jihadist who murdered three French soldiers, a Rabbi and three Jewish children, ages 8, 6, 3 in cold blood.

What is equally sickening—and in many ways more frightening—is when progressive and peace-loving politicians, professors and journalists simply don’t grasp the gruesome reality: There are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Jihadists, whose hate to every single Jew knows no bounds. These are people who find it moral and noble to lift an 8 year old angelic girl by her hair and shoot her in her template, only because she was born to Jewish parents.

Here are three examples of this delusional ignorance, pontificated by a politician, a historian and a journalist.

In Brussels this week, at a conference on Palestinian refugees, Catherine Ashton, the foreign policy chief of the European Union, cast her eyes beyond the killings of three Jewish children in Toulouse. Ashton linked this atrocity to the tragic killings of children in recent times elsewhere in the world—in Belgium, in Norway, in Syria, "and when we see what is happening in Gaza."

The Toulouse-equals-Gaza remark naturally drew a torrent of protests in Israel, with officials denouncing Ashton for equating the deliberate murder of Jewish children in Toulouse with the loss of Gaza children in Israeli defensive operations against terrorist groups using children as human shields.

Ashton said her comments had been misinterpreted, but the damage, of course, has been done.

Then in a March 21 article in the English Forward, “Toulouse Tragedy Shows Rhetoric's Danger,” Houston history professor Robert Zaretsky shifts the focus of the murder in France to the intolerant rhetoric by French leaders about Muslims: “It is a matter of public record that Sarkozy’s minister of the interior, Claude Guéant, has made a series of provocative claims concerning French Muslims. Whether it was his assertion that “all civilizations are not equal” or his prediction that if foreigners legally residing in France were given the vote, the French would find themselves eating halal meat in school and office cafeterias, such remarks fall well outside the purview of a man responsible for the nation’s security.

“This is no less the case for a president who, over the years, has made a political target of the French Muslims, a discourse most recently marked by Sarkozy’s declarations that ‘we have too many foreigners in France…’”

Instead of identifying and bemoaning the monstrous, barbaric and grotesque belief system of Islamists as the cause of all this verbiage, she comes close to blaming the murders in Toulouse on this anti-Islamic rhetoric.

Finally, in a recent news article, the New York Times finds a way to use the killing of the three children in France as a peg to blame Israel for Palestinian children casualties in its response to Gaza rocket barrages.

Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner penned an article in the March 21 edition of the Times ("Fury in Israel at Remarks Linking Gaza to Toulouse" page A5). She ends her piece with a telling paragraph:

"In the latest cross-border violence between Israel and militant groups in Gaza, 26 Palestinians were killed over four days, according to the Israeli military. Most were militants, but four were civilians. A 12-year-old boy was among those killed in Israeli airstrikes; another boy, 14, was killed by explosives in disputed circumstances. In the same period, Palestinians fired over 150 rockets into southern Israel, none of which claimed a life."

Never mind that the four-day cross-border violence was started by Gaza terrorists and Israel was responding under its internationally recognized right of self-defense—a point neatly hidden from Kershner's copy. If Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committee had desisted from launching volleys of rockets, there would have been no violence, and Gaza kids would have been spared.

Never mind also that the 14-year-old Gaza boy wasn't killed "in disputed circumstances," as Kershner puts it.  A reporter of the French news service, Agence France Presse, investigated the scene of the boy's death and reported there was no evidence whatsoever that he was killed by an airstrike. Everything instead pointed to youngsters playing with live ammunition. Kershner, however, obfuscates the circumstances so as not to exonerate the Israeli military.

Never mind that when 150 rockets rain down on civilian communities in southern Israel, tens of thousands of Israeli children are traumatized by sirens that alert them to take cover within a matter of seconds. Many of these children develop lasting psychological pain and suffering. But widespread cases of post-traumatic stress don't enter into Kershner's equation.

The only link between the Toulouse massacre and the four-day Gaza cross-border violence is that innocents have been targeted by Jew-hating terrorists. But don't expect to read that in the New York Times.

These three examples are telling. They inform us of the real danger confronting us, not only from the Jihadist blood-thirsty murderers but from the scores of Western leaders and thinkers who will forever excuse their behavior and put the blame on the weeping victims.
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