Double standard: Dead Jews vs. dead Arabs

national | miscellaneous | news report Friday August 02, 2002 23:26 by Alan Caruba

Who was Salah Shehade? He was responsible for hundreds of Israeli deaths, including the Sbarro Pizza Parlor, the Dolphinarium where teenaged Israelis were torn to shreds, the Passover Eve attack in a Netanya hotel, and countless other attacks. His targets were always civilians and children.

Does anyone seriously believe the Palestinians want peace? The Israelis retaliated against a man who had plotted the deaths of hundreds of their countrymen and, in return, his colleagues kill whom? University students. Young people among whom were four Americans. The Palestinians danced again in the streets of Gaza.

When Israeli Jews die, the world looks on and regards it as part of a war being waged against them. I am not talking of soldiers, but the countless civilians, the children and teenagers who are targeted along with others. As in the Hebrew University bombing, the aim here is to kill those who would become the next generation of Israelis. On a broader scale, it is a war against the only legitimate democracy in the Middle East. It is a war on modernity, a war against the West.

When the vicious Hamas commander of the Al-Qassam Brigades in Gaza was killed and the civilians - some children - among whom he hid, died with him, the world rings its hands and cries out against the Israelis. "Look at this horror. A building destroyed with innocent people in it."

How quickly we forget that not one, but three buildings were similarly targeted by the likes of Salah Shehade, an Arab for whom the lives of Jews and other infidels have no value at all. Both towers of the World Trade Center were totally destroyed with the loss of nearly 3,000 lives, along with a large section of the Pentagon with more loss of life. A fourth commandeered commercial jet was presumably headed for the White House, taking still more innocents to their death.

Ultimately, there is no difference between Salah Shehade, Yasser Arafat, the sheikhs and princes of Saudi Arabia, or Osama bin Laden's followers. They all are members of the "Arab nation." They are all Jihadists waging war on the infidel in general and the Jew in particular. In this, they are joined by the ayatollahs of Iran.

Who was Salah Shehade? He was responsible for hundreds of Israeli deaths, including the Sbarro Pizza Parlor, the Dolphinarium where teenaged Israelis were torn to shreds, the Passover Eve attack in a Netanya hotel, and countless other attacks. His targets were always civilians and children.

He reportedly was planning to blow up a bridge in the Gaza Strip used exclusively by Israeli traffic and was planning to send a boat packed with explosives to a crowded Israeli beach. He was planning to kidnap soldiers and civilians to hold as ransom for Palestinians held in Israeli jails. Shehade may have been a hero to Palestinians, but he was a vicious killer who, like the rest of Hamas, had the single goal of destroying Israel.

When the Israelis discovered where he was, they killed him before he killed still more of their own people. He was living in Gaza, yet the Palestinian Authority never arrested and jailed Shehade! The response of Arab nations was to bring the killing of this monster to the Security Council of the United Nations after having ignored more than 75 Palestinian suicide bombings that had killed more than 500 Israeli civilians.

The U.S. called the action "heavy-handed." An odd rebuke from a nation that killed more than 600 and wounded thousands of civilians during its pursuit of Noriega in Panama. This from a nation that bombed a neighborhood in Somalia, killing more than a thousand civilians, after it lost fifteen soldiers. When we invaded Afghanistan, the "collateral damage," i.e., civilians, was simply the cost of war. However, if Israel, in its effort to defend itself, kills the leader of Hamas Al-Qassam Brigade, the whole world joins in the condemnation of the action.

This is the same double standard that prevailed in Europe as nation after nation turned a blind eye or actually aided the Nazis in rounding up their own citizens if they had the misfortune of being Jews. It is the same double standard that allows Europe today to reek of anti-Semitism and continue its support of the Palestinians.

When, if ever, will the world acknowledge that the Palestinians have no intention, nor ever had, of making peace with the Israelis? When will the world acknowledge that the Palestinians are not a separate national entity, but just Arabs like those of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the other nations in that cancerous part of the world called the Middle East? One by one, the nations of that festering sore of evil and backwardness must be dragged into the 2lst century, their people liberated, their children educated, and Islam reformed.

Let us mourn the latest victims of Hamas. Let us celebrate that Salah Shehade is dead. Let us hope the Israelis kill more of his colleagues and let us salute them when they do. Most of all let us understand that good and evil do exist in the world and the failure to resist evil allows it to bloom like weeds.