This incident is from last year. It is one of the reasons we have to take to the streets on April 19th. A world that is not terribly bothered by Hamas inciting and praising this type of incident, but reserves all its condemnation for the IDF when it, despite enormous measures to the contrary, kills Hamas supporting civilians, is clearly immoral.
Bradley Burston writes for Israel's left wing newspaper Ha'aretz. Left wing and right wing are agreed on this.
| Palestinian terrorism as a natural act | |||
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| By Bradley Burston | |||
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Tags: bulldozer, terror  |
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Click here for more from Bradley Burston JERUSALEM - What, exactly, is a decent person supposed to think? On a quiet and clear morning in Jerusalem, a woman is driving toward the heart of the city, her infant with her in the car. There is nothing to fear.
There is nothing to fear. Except for the man behind the wheel of a bulldozer, who has taken it upon himself to kill Jews. Not Israeli security force personnel, not occupation troops, not the Shin Bet. Jews. Women and children and the elderly and the infirm. Jews who may be in favor of an independent Palestinian state. Jews who have nothing against Arabs. Jews who may work to end the occupation. Jews. When the killing starts, the woman behind the wheel does what Jews have learned to do since the Holocaust, and for 2,000 years before that: Save your child. Whatever it takes. She manages to throw her infant out the side window and clear of the car before the Hero of Palestine steers the massive earth mover toward her car for a second time and crushes it flat. It doesn't take long, after the he has finished overturning buses full of Jews - and Arabs as well - and driving over other cars, even backing up to crush one twice, before the public relations and marketing department of Hamas had formulated its praise for the attack. "We consider it as a natural reaction to the daily aggression and crimes committed against our people in the West Bank and all over the occupied lands," Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told the press. Natural. Only natural. The Islamic Jihad's armed wing could not have agreed more."The Jerusalem Brigades bless the heroic operation in Jerusalem as the natural reaction to the crimes of the occupation," it announced. The attack came after the latest in a series of attempts by groups in the states, some of them atheist/anarchist, some of them Muslim, some of them Jewish, to lobby Prostestant churches and respected universities to divest from Caterpillar, because the IDF uses its bulldozers to demolish Palestinian homes. I would like to hear them now. Just once. I would like them to divest from terrorism. Not understand it as the natural outgrowth of the crimes of occupation. For once, I would like my sisters and brothers on the left to be every bit as hard on their comrades the Palestinians for taking a bulldozer and crushing Jews, as they are on Israel for bulldozing homes. Write a letter to Ismail Haniyeh, to Mahmoud Zahar, to Sami Anu Zuhri. Protest in your own communities, for once, calling terrorism what it is. Intentional, brutal, premeditated, immoral. Murder. What's a decent person supposed to think? That it's all right to launch rockets against residential areas during a cease-fire, because the occupation is still going on? That it's all right to crush Jewish civilians, because the occupation has not been halted and settlers continue to build homes? What's a decent person to think when Palestinian groups fall over one another trying to claim the bulldozer attack? And when one of the groups is the Fatah Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade? What's a decent person to think when the man who drove the bulldozer was himself the father of two, a construction worker from East Jerusalem, whose desire to kill Jews - and, in so doing, further soil and damage the cause and name of Palestine - was greater than his feeling for the mother who had to throw her baby from a car to save it? I, for one, would like to ask for proof of what it is that Palestinians really want. I no longer believe that it's as simple as wanting statehood. This is what I don't yet want to admit: that for all these years, in 2008 no less than in 1902, what a critical mass of Palestinians want most, perhaps even more than statehood, may be as simple as the vile thrill of vengeance, as straightforward as nothing more than seeing Jews dead and gone. |
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