There’s been another attack in Israel. Shalom Hamelech was shot and his wife Limor, 7 months pregnant, was wounded and taken to hospital for an emergency C-section, after Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade gunmen opened fire on them.
I don’t know him, or his family. I have no connection to them whatsoever. But reading about his death, it struck me that far too many victims of terror become nameless and faceless to us. Shalom Hamelech was 25 years old. He had a young family, including a 14-month baby and a new baby on the way. He had parents, friends, loved ones, and hopes and dreams. And he was killed because he was hated simply for being Jewish.
The media splashes the bus bombings on front pages, but attacks where only one or two people are killed go largely unnoticed. This leads to a dangerous devaluation of human life, whereupon one dead Jew isn’t enough of a big deal for the large headlines – there’ve got to be ten, or twenty, or a hundred. People react emotionally when there are babies or children killed. The North American press makes a big stink if Americans are killed. Everyone knows the name Marla Bennett. We all remember Shalhevet Pass. But in a month, who – outside his friends and family – will remember the name of Shalom Hamelech?
I’ve posted this link before but I think it bears a repeat post: How quickly the names and lives and faces of the victims of terrorism are forgotten. How easily we relegate them to the status of a number or a statistic.
The Palestinian groups name schools and summer camps after their suicide bombers, and hold parades in their honour. Palestinian parents name their children after terrorists, hoping that they, too, will grow up to aspire to the “lofty” achievement of murdering Jews.
We, on the other hand, know that the victims of terrorism – innocent though they may be – are not martyrs. Some were heroes, like the security guards who wrestled with bombers to prevent them from entering crowded establishments. Others were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were ordinary people, living ordinary lives. And that’s exactly the point. To pretend otherwise would be to diminish their memories.
Once in a while, it’s important to see the faces of those lost, to remember what the whole point is in the first place.
can’t argue
oh yeah, except to repeat your….um…what’s that word? oh yeah …racism:
“Palestinian parents name their children after terrorists, hoping that they, too, will grow up to aspire to the “lofty” achievement of murdering Jews.”
Sorry yanni, I can argue with that.
Please, hanthala, present your counter-argument.
Firstly, many Palestinians killed as a result of Israeli military operations are not militants but civilians, ordinary people living ordinary lives who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They too are referred to as martyrs.
Secondly, there IS a shrine built to commemorate Baruch Goldstein — the American-Israeli settler who massacred 29 Palestinians at prayer in Hebrons Ibrihimi Mosque — to which some settlers flock regularly to mark his honour.
As a relevant side-note, it was following Goldsteins killing spree in 1994 that the first Palestinian suicide-bombing inside Israel took place.
And finally, could you define ‘terrorism’? Because you seem to be using the term awfully exclusively.
You see, for me, terrorist acts are those undertaken to inspire fear within an entire population — and not just against those doing the fighting. By this definition, the Palestinian militants’ random targetting of Israeli civilians certainly qualifies, but so does the Israeli military’s suffocating occupation of entire cities as an overwhelming expression of power, not to mention missile strikes targetting busy city streets, which unfailingly produce their own random killing of civilians.
Hanthala, you and the rest of the Jew-haters (Jewish and non-Jewish alike)out there can’t wait to find fault with everything and anything Israel and the Jews do – Israel/Jews shouldn’t do this, Israel/Jews shouldn’t do that. Essentially, Israel/Jews shouldn’t exist.
Well, you know what Hanthala? What you and your ilk think are irrelevant. We are not going away, and we don’t care whether you like us or approve of what we must do to defend ourselves against a barbaric, primitive population.
With love of Israel,
Sharon
Firstly, many Palestinians killed as a result of Israeli military operations are not militants but civilians, ordinary people living ordinary lives who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They too are referred to as martyrs.
Two questions for you, “me”:
Firstly, stastically, what proportion of Israelis killed since September 2000 have been innocent civilians, and what proportion of Palestinians?
Secondly, when you say “they too are referred to as ‘martyrs'”, what do you mean by “too”? Should all “martyrs” be glorified, even the ones who died while killing dozens of innocent Jews?
Cecil Rhodes, I mean, uhh, Sharon
You are a racist! While I certainly would be inclined to agree with you were you to claim that suicide attacks are barbaric and savage (as they are), you crossed the line there when you insunaed that Palestinian culture is inherently such….eeeeeech!
Furthermore, I’d be interested to find out what ARE YOUR IMPRESSIONS OF SEPHARDIC JEWRY? The reason that I ask this is-I know I am going into utterly painful territory here-the case *might* very well be made that, on a cultural level, a Moroccan or Iraqi Jew has more in common with an Arab muslim (and even moreso with an Arab Christian) than he/she does with an Ashkenazi Jew. The Sephardi eat much the same food as the Arabs (with the exception of the booze), they (before they got the boot from their homes) spoke Arabic- they were Jews no doubt, but also culturally very Arabic-in the same sense I suppose that one can easily be “Jewish” (whatever that is) and “Canadian” (whatever that is) simultaneously. In short, I am asking whether you hold the same views as Israeli columnist Amnon Dankner, who celebrated the wave of Russian Jews arriving in Israel in the early 90’s due to the fact he felt that:
“Israeli public life is becoming more and more Levantine: primitive prejudices, ugly celebrations, and the air is filled with their strong smell. Is the aliyah from Russia going to change all this? You can bet on it! Think about it…Half a million Jews who love to learn and read!”
So, a reply would be appreciated you racist bigot…are they somehow different? Are you a Sephardi and can’t reconcile how close you are to the Arabs? Or are you a European Jew who loves the idea of throwing these poor people in development towns in the Negev, just so don’t have to be reminded of Israel’s “other side”?
Uhhsegacs…don’t get your panties in a wad over it — the truth hurts, I know.
How can you *possibly* compare Sephardic Jews with Arabs? Sephardic Jews are JEWISH, remember? Just because they share some similarities, like eating hummus, please….
And by the way, “racist bigot” is redundant.
segacs,
Your two questions:
1. Firstly, stastically, what proportion of Israelis killed since September 2000 have been innocent civilians, and what proportion of Palestinians?
Dont know — but isnt the question a reversal of your point about going beyond politicization of the numbers in order to humanize the victims?
I guess the point youre making here is that the militants INTENTIONALLY target civilians, wheareas the military does so ACCIDENTALLY. To me, firing missiles, for example, from an Apache helicopter into an apartment building to kill one man (and I make the point again, this itself is a violation of international law), which unfortunately ends up killing 16 uninvolved residents, can not be considered an ACCIDENT. Nor can firing missiles onto an urban street and killing a mother with her children who happened to be driving in the area be considered and ACCIDENT. These are acts which it is KNOWN will produce unrelated casualties — in that sense, the fact that they are undertaken anyway rests the responsibility for their results squarely on the shoulders of the military. The fact that they are undertaken with impunity repeatedly makes them understood as military policy, and this idea — that it is possible at any time for a helicopter/tank/armored vehicle to come barrelling down on your house/street/car firing — serves to manufacture terror within the resident population. If you think that, and I agree with you on this, having to feel fear from a potential suicide bomb as you get on a bus in Tel Aviv is terror, imagine for a moment what it might feel like to simply exist in Jenin.
2. Secondly, when you say “they too are referred to as ‘martyrs'”, what do you mean by “too”? Should all “martyrs” be glorified, even the ones who died while killing dozens of innocent Jews?
What I was saying was that this language is used to described all those killed. My point was that your use of martyrs on the blog left out the innocent victims (kind of like you feel the offensive reduction of human lives to numbers leaves out the humanity of the victims), so I wanted to draw a correlation between the innocent Israeli dead and the innocent Palestinian dead. I am not calling for the glorification of either the militants who take on their terror operations nor that of the military or settler population which take on theirs.
Sharon,
A message from Avraham Burg, MK, in Yediot Aharonot:
[www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.08.29/oped3.html]
Here is what the prime minister should say to the people:
The time for illusions is over. The time for decisions has arrived. We
love the entire land of our forefathers and in some other time we would have wanted to live here alone. But that will not happen. The Arabs,
too, have dreams and needs.
Between the Jordan and the Mediterranean there is no longer a clear Jewish majority. And so, fellow citizens, it is not possible to keep
the whole thing without paying a price. We cannot keep a Palestinian
majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think ourselves the only democracy in the Middle East. There cannot be democracy without equal rights for all who live here, Arab as well as Jew. We cannot keep the territories and preserve a Jewish majority in the world’s only Jewish
state not by means that are humane and moral and Jewish.
Do you want the greater Land of Israel? No problem. Abandon democracy. Let’s institute an efficient system of racial separation here, with prison camps and detention villages. Qalqilya Ghetto and Gulag Jenin.
Do you want a Jewish majority? No problem. Either put the Arabs on
railway cars, buses, camels and donkeys and expel them en masse or
separate ourselves from them absolutely, without tricks and gimmicks.
There is no middle path. We must remove all the settlements all of
them and draw an internationally recognized border between the Jewish
national home and the Palestinian national home. The Jewish Law of
Return will apply only within our national home, and their right of return will apply only within the borders of the Palestinian state.
Do you want democracy? No problem. Either abandon the greater Land of
Israel, to the last settlement and outpost, or give full citizenship
and voting rights to everyone, including Arabs. The result, of course, will be that those who did not want a Palestinian state alongside us will have one in our midst, via the ballot box.
That’s what the prime minister should say to the people.
Do you want a Jewish majority? No problem. Either put the Arabs on
railway cars, buses, camels and donkeys and expel them en masse — or
separate ourselves from them absolutely, without tricks and gimmicks.
Excellent idea – I love it!
Well, what can I say? Thanks for your honesty.
The irony that you chose not to see the existence of the following paragraph magnifies the irony in your accusation that Jew-haters…[think] essentially, Israel/Jews shouldnt exist. That irony being (for the hard of seeing) that you clearly think that Palestine/Palestinian Arabs shouldnt exist.
Well, you know what Sharon? (to paraphrase) They do exist and theyre not going away, and no matter how tightly you shut your eyes theyre going to continue existing.
So youve got a couple of choices: either wake up from your illusions and deal with the reality at hand or keep on sleeping, in which case reality will move on without you.
This, I think, is exactly the point that the article above was trying to make. Thanks for providing the example.
Avraham Burg is a nice guy, but that’s not exactly fresh thinking, nor particularly controversial. He’s suggesting an autonomous Palestinian state in West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem.
Which is something most Israelis see as either preferable or inevitable or both; the vocal minority which loudly disagrees is certainly not going to be convinced by his rehash, nor are his words likely to move the majority to act against this minority. But, then, you can’t please all of the people all of the time.
On Ashkenazi Jews as really Europeans who are foreigners in the Middle East, it’s disappointing that uhhhsegacs resorts to this old canard. I always find it ironic how, during a 1000-year history in Europe (that’s a long time), and during which Jews mingled extensively with the host populations, shared their culture, food, and so forth — despite all that, it is only after killing two-thirds of them, after continuing heavy outmigration, and after others of these Jews returned to the Middle East — only then, with Jews safely outside Europe, did the world decide that they could be Europeans.
Mind you, this might be an effective strategy for the Rom/Gypsies. Maybe right after they establish a homeland in India and leave to live in it, Europeans will suddenly start deciding that these Rom aren’t a foreign element after all.
Kidding aside, uhhsegacs, if you thought that the desperate striving of Ashkenazi Jews to accomplish Europeanness was impressive, you should look to some of the societies who were Europe’s external colonies (India, Africa, and elsewhere), particularly the French. Now those were what I call Europeanized elites!
Finally Ashkenazi Jews — and Iraqi Jews, and Moroccan Jews (you seem to know quite little about this same Europeanization in both of those countries, very especially among Jews, at the same time Jews lived there) — are moving beyond this worshipping of European Enlightenment culture. It’s a slow and painful process, marked by both steps and missteps; culturally speaking, though, it’s another step in the history of a people.
I’m terribly sorry, Me, but must I remind you that “Palestinians” do NOT exist?
Really, your ignorance is becoming quite tedious.
Hey Nanook, looks like we’ve got another Lucile. I`d be interested in what you`d have to say to Sharon. I’m too bored of that particular routine to respond to him or her.
haha, my comment where I called Sharon a “racist pig” got edited while the comment where Sharon called Palestinians a “barbaric, primitive population” is still up there. Thanx segacs for establishing your bias. Only pro-Israel racism is allowed on this site, right? Right.
Sharon, why do you think that “Palestinians” don’t exist as a people?
It’s true that the Palestinian national movement is a relatively recent invention, but any such movement has to emerge at some time. Once, a long time ago, the “Jews” didn’t exist, either. A few millennia later, here we are.
It’s also true that many people who call themselves “pro-Palestinian” think that the way to accomplish their goals is to argue loudly that Jews don’t exist as a people, or to mischaracterize early quotes from the Zionist movement (“land without a people” as “land without people”), or simply to deny that our history ever existed, often from the most mainstream of sources (Arafat on the Temple Mount: never existed, etc).
That doesn’t make it right for us as Jews to respond to provocation with provocation. Palestinians and Jews are both peoples whose roots are in the Levant. This is the starting point for any political solution; it is also the starting point for any dialogue about those politics.
Hanthala, the truth is that I really don’t know what I would say to Sharon.
1) I don’t think Sharon and I would agree on some of the basic issues. But I do think that if I were truly going to have a dialogue with Ariel Sharon — a weird thing to think about, for sure — I’d want to start by sitting and listening to him for a long time.
That’s because I don’t think it’s possible to have an honest conversation with someone without being able to try and put myself in their shoes, and I truly don’t understand many of the decisions Sharon has taken. It’s possible, as many say, that he has taken these decisions because he is simply a wicked man. But I doubt that he sees himself that way, and I believe that whatever motivates most of the decision he takes are never revealed publicly. If I were going to argue with the man, I’d want to understand what I was arguing with first.
2) Okay, but I can guess at some of what he’d say, and I know enough to know that nothing I can think of hasn’t already been put to him by someone far smarter and more persuasive than I.
So I’d want to get him to a point in the conversation where he distinguished between settlements as the realisation of a territorial dream (whether religious or non-religious), and settlements as a convenient security tactic — which is, I believe, the Israeli government’s true motivation in maintaining them. And then I’d want him to lay out, in an ideal planet, what tactical conditions even he’d agree have to be in place in order to abandon them.
And then the conversation would probably be over. But we would finally have learned something that, all rhetoric aside, I believe we don’t really know. And that would give anyone working for a political solution to the problem much to go on.
3) But, as I’ve said before, I believe that the political portion is only a very small part of the problem. Much more of it is cultural. And that is something that honest people can choose to resolve if they want to — through multiple, sustained movements. As I’ve said before, my strong feeling is that we instead have the opposite, people literally behaving just as the least constructive parties to the conflict would have them do, and building hatred and animosity in places so far removed from the conflict that goodwill (and dollars, admittedly) is all that they ever had to contribute in the first place. That’s the real shame, in my opinion.
When you complete a rudimentary study of Islam, and you finish reading a few salient passages in the Koran, perhaps then you might start to see things as they are, not as you with.
Moslems do not associate, talk, and least of all, compromise with dhimmi.
You mistakenly assume that the Arabs want peace. Clearly, they seek world domination — much like the Church.
Not to change subjects, Jew-haters, but I can’t wait to see how the Church respons to the Islamization of Europe. I doubt the Pope will go down without a fight. Too much $$ at stake.
Can’t wait for the next Crusade!
Please forgive my typos, I was distracted by the Arab shrieking and blowing his nose withour a tissue in the neighboring parking lot (as he stepped into his Mercedes SUV, of course.)
Oh, I’ve read a fair bit of the Koran. On the other hand, I’m aware that religions are living things — they are not frozen texts, they are what people do with them. Read the Christian Bible lately?
You seem to think that bad deeds come from a book; they come from people. It’s more than legitimate to criticise the actions of such people, something I do all the time.
You seem to think that the two options are the offensive and racist ravings of Islamists seeking to rebuild caliphates, or else total submission of all the Muslims. Neither option is tenable.
You seem to think that, just because naive Westerns caught in the headlights of their romantic exoticism lump all the Muslims together and shriek against anyone who dares criticise the actions of homicidal Islamists, that the only alternative is to adopt the mirror image of that caricature. That’s plain silly.
You can’t wait for the next Crusade. The last ones masascred Jews across Europe and the Middle East, one of the calamities we mark on Tisha b’Av — that was, like, a month go — among other things resulting in a herem in York, England that ended only in the 1970s. You may want to rethink.
Despite all this. If you really have made up your mind that all Muslims are the same as Islamists. Or that all the deluded things you hear being said in the media are the same as what all Muslims believe and are compelled to believe. Then you should at least have the courage to read a book which challenges your beliefs, and see whether you still hold them afterwards. Here is one by a Muslim. Here is one by a Jew.
Sorry, the first of the two book links didn’t work. I meant this.
Nanook, I mean habibi, if you insist upon believing only what you want to believe, you will destroy yourself.
Just don’t destroy those of us who value our God, our people, and our land. Enough said.
With love of Israel,
So segacs,
Now that I’ve answered your questions, maybe you can return the favour?
1. Would you agree that the IDF is committing violations of human rights law by implementing its policy of assassinations in the occupied territories?
2. Would you agree that Israel is in violation of numerous UNSC resolutions by maintaining its military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza?
3. Would you agree that the ongoing settlement building in the West Bank is a violation of international law?
Sharon,
Heres how it works:
First you covet something that other people have; then you create an identity to group them all under which allows you to dehumanize them; then you go ahead and take what they have.
In this way, the racism that you have created helps you to avoid (for the moment) the moral dilemma that would otherwise accompany what is in fact an act of theft and murder.
Enjoy the trip.
“Sharon” is Samer Elathrash. Nice try Trash face.
Sorry, that’s Elatrash
so you can’t believe that a digustingly abnoxious racist like Sharon can be one of your own?
okay, let’s see… segacs is Adam Slater in disguise.. nice try slater.. you almost fooled us there, especially with the personal photo albums, but you won’t get away with it!
ooooo…you guys are so cute when you get angry! 😉
segacs…? Questions?
Or is your hyper-moralizing reserved for the Palestinians only, with Israel-right-or-wrong getting a free pass to act as illegaly and immoraly as it wishes?
Oh yeah, you’ve got a really open-minded attitude towards any reply that someone would give you there . . . *sarcasm*
Hype-moralizing? That’s very good – a polysyllabic word! Something new?
Please, return to your caravan. Your camels need water.
Nanook, I mean habibi, if you insist upon believing only what you want to believe, you will destroy yourself.
Odd that you should feel that way but, sure, I’ll bite. What do you think I insist on believing?
Typical segacs,
Always bails out when it comes time to answering the tough questions.
One-sided moralizing, one-sided presentation of issues, one-sided vision of the world.
You oughta get a monocle.