"Bloody Friday" Free Pass For Terror?

                                Tourists leaving Sousse, Tunisia after terror attack            --photo: Daily Record 

ISIS supporters made good on the call this week from Abu Muhammad al-Adani, Islamic State official spokesman, to use the month of Ramadan to create a “calamity for the infidels…and apostate Muslims.”

On Friday, they slaughtered 38 people, mostly tourists from England, who were relaxing at a beach in Tunisia.  Earlier in the day, terrorists in France beheaded a businessman after ramming a truck into a factory and causing an explosion. And at around the same time, in Kuwait, a suicide bomber killed 25 worshipers and injured hundreds at a mosque.

On any given day if you happen to be an “infidel,” that is, a Christian, Jew, Hindu, or Buddhist, or if you are a Muslim who goes to the wrong kind of mosque, a former Muslim, or an atheist, you are a target. A target wide as the world.

While the horror that was the beach at Sousse, and the beheading in France by a terrorist who was known to French authorities, may take Western attention for a while (for a lifetime for those who lost loved ones and those who are among the many wounded) it is especially scary to think that quickly we will stop paying attention, again.

Terror attacks in France and Tunisia are very recent, those that ended the lives of 12 people who were working at the offices of Charlie Hebdo and 4 people who were shopping in a kosher market in Paris as well as the terrorism at the Bardo Museum in Tunis that left 22 people dead.  Yet, every new attack shows up as if anomalous, as if only tenuously connected to what has come before, and without acknowledgment by Western powers of the war that has been declared on us.  

Instead there will be some speeches and memorials and investigations. The UN will focus its next emergency session on Israel.

As a member of the vast, world majority of non-jihadists, of we, the people enjoying living life and intent on continuing to do so, I’d be encouraged to hear some direct statements from our leadership. What kind of plan is there for defense of the overwhelming majority of the people of the world?

A disturbing question but an obvious one:  Is giving nuclear weapons to Iran --whose mullahs see themselves in opposition to ISIS but also to the US and Israel – the best you can do?

The Terrorist is being Treated in the Hospital

                                                                                              photo  by Sebastian Schiener

                                                                                                                   published at Times of Israel

There is something jarring about this sentence in the news. “The terrorist is being treated in [the] hospital.”

Wounded by security personnel too late, the terrorist had already murdered 26-year-old, Dahlia Lemkus, whose neighbors knew her as “the kind, giving, loving young woman” who was studying to be an occupational therapist. He had already stabbed two other people and sent a third into shock.

Islamic Jihad has taken responsibility for this attack. By responsibility it is meant that Islamic Jihad has congratulated itself for supporting and accomplishing the bizarrely un-brave act of jumping out of a car and stabbing random people with a knife.

Meanwhile, Israel mourns Dahlia, and the others killed by Palestinian terrorists this month: on the same day as Dahlia, 20 year-old Almog Shiloni from Modi’in who died after being stabbed in Tel Aviv as he was on his way back to his base; Chief Inspector Jadan Assad, the Druze border patrol officer who was killed by a terrorist ramming his vehicle into people in Jerusalem, and teenager, Shalom Baadani, who had been riding his bicycle and was killed by the same terrorist at another location nearby. The week before, American-Israeli 3-month-old baby, Haya Zissel Braun and 22 year-old Karen Yemima Mosquera from Ecuador were killed by another “car terrorist” at a Jerusalem light rail stop. While all these funerals have been going on and over a hundred Israelis this month have been dealing with injuries from terrorism, “the terrorist is being treated in the hospital.”

And, rightfully so. Because, as in America, perpetrators in Israel who survive their own acts of terror get quality medical treatment and the benefit of Western law.

Fatah and Hamas leaders have stated that stabbing people with knives or running into them with cars is a “natural response.” If this is the case then treating, in an Israeli hospital, someone who has set out to murder any Israelis he happens to see must be an unnatural response.

But both are learned responses.

It does not come naturally to decide to stab passersby with knives or to intentionally run over a baby with a car. Nor is it simply natural to try to treat humanely even those who commit such actions. These are learned behaviors.

At Dahlia’s funeral, her sister, Michal, implored Israelis to go on, emphatically, with every day life.

Treating the terrorist in the hospital; going on with life in Israel; not letting hate take over: some things to stand one’s ground for.

                                                                                                      comments welcomed at Times of Israel

UPDATE:  And now there are four more murders.  Four people killed and others injured while praying in their Jerusalem synagogue.