Making excuses for terror

John Podhoretz
New York Post
23 March '11
Posted before Shabbat

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/making_excuses_for_terror_gQlB1lBjCycewngYcjnlwO#ixzz1HWuikzLq

Palestinians slaughter again

Throughout the Arab world, ordinary people by the thousands and millions are clamoring for political change that will alter their lives for the better. Meanwhile, in the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, Palestinians are blowing up Jews.

We don't know where the conflagrations in countries from Tunisia to Egypt to Bahrain to Syria will lead. Some portents -- like Egypt's vote over the weekend, which proved to be a show of power by the radical Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood -- are frightening.

But that doesn't change the fact that these earthshaking events are the result of people attempting to seize the rights to their own destinies.

Meanwhile, a single Arab populace living under two authoritarian diktats -- one run by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, one by Hamas in Gaza -- remains quiet and sullen and inactive. And the terrorists in their midst fire rockets at Jewish towns and detonate city buses.

In Libya, heroic Americans in the Navy and Air Force are protecting powerless civilians from the wrath of the madman Moammar Khadafy -- civilians whose only crime is wanting Khadafy gone after 42 years of his noxious dictatorship.

Meanwhile, as 30 people lay bleeding in a hospital and one was declared dead after yesterday's detonation of a Jerusalem bus stop, the Reuters news agency published this sentence: "Police said it was a 'terrorist attack' -- Israel's term for a Palestinian strike."

Yes, blowing up a municipal conveyance on which people are going to work is, to Reuters, a "strike" -- a term usually reserved for a surprise raid on, say, an ammo dump or an enemy military base or a Libyan anti-aircraft battery.

For Reuters, as for the evil monsters who pushed the button, Jews on a bus are nothing more than a target.



Reuters was joined in its rhetorical barbarity by the Pulitzer Prize-winning international sob sister Nicholas Kristof, of The New York Times. He tweeted this in the wake of the news:

"Terror attack in Jerusalem is inexcusable, and hurts Palestinian cause. Arab militancy feeds Israeli militancy and [visa versa]."

Note what he does here. After covering his self-regarding posterior with the word "inexcusable," Kristof swings directly into moral equivalency.

Fact is, you can count on one hand and a couple of fingers the number of terrorist attacks committed by "Israeli militants" over the course of the last 60 years. The number of attacks committed in the name of "Arab militancy"?

Thousands.

Or maybe tens of thousands.

From the time Israel "disengaged" from Gaza in 2005 to let the Palestinians govern themselves, "militants" have fired a total of 4,385 Qassam rockets at Israel from the strip. Each of those rocket firings, aimed at an Israeli town, constitutes a terrorist act. What is the purpose of these terrorist acts? To kill Jews.

Now something new is happening. It's not just Qassams anymore. Now Palestinian terrorists are firing more dangerous Grad missiles, with multiple warheads and a range of 25 miles, at Israeli towns and cities. In the last week, before the bus bombing, the cities of Ashkelon and Beersheba were hit.

It cannot be said often enough: Three times in the last 15 years (twice in 2000, once in 2008), Israeli prime ministers have offered Palestinians a statehood deal so generous that it's far from certain Israel's own political system could have survived the deal's implementation.

Each time the offer was met with war -- the suicide-bomb war of 2000-04 and the Gaza rocket war of 2008-09.

Outside Gaza and the Palestinian Authority, the people of the Middle East are telling their potentates they want something better. They want something more. They want a future. And the Palestinians? Seems like they want blood.

johnpodhoretz@gmail.com

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