Woke up this morning to a phonecall from my friend in Haifa, with some horrible news: it turns out her brother lost two close friends in Wednesday’s bus bombing.
Tal Kehrmann and Elizabeth Katzman were best friends. The girls were high school students who were on their way home from looking at costumes for a play. One was close friends of my friend’s brother, the other was best friends with his girlfriend.
It makes me horrified and angry. Of course, every innocent victim of terror has friends, family, and people who care about them. Who the hell gave anyone the right to take away their lives?
You can’t worry constantly, and when a terror attack happens on the other side of the country, or even the other side of the city, most Israelis mourn but then go on with their daily lives. When it happens two minutes from your home, and takes friends from your community, it’s different. My friend takes that bus regularly. It could just as easily have been her on the bus on Wednesday. Instead, she’s fine but her brother had to attend the funerals of two of his friends. Where’s the sanity? How do they live like that? How do they cope?
And so, I file this away under T for Tragedy and start my day. How many more friends will they have to lose before the madness stops?
Unfortunately, so long as people have a horror for what can so easily be done to their loved ones, the cost will always be a minimal one for terrorists. Lets not forget that the purpose of terrorism is not to achieve a tangible political result, but to horrify and shock the world. At a certain point, this becomes an end unto itself. It is for this reason that the Sharon government’s policy of slow and steady eradication is the only logical course of action.
Yes, of course, because it isn’t terror to “eradicate” Palestinians you fascist dickwad. How members any group who suffered the effects of a genocide can speak like this is really beyond me.
eradication of terrorists.
Funny, how quickly jew-haters leap to moral equivalency.
so moral equivalency is thinking that eradication is wrong when nazis do it and when the idf does it?
Well of course, the killing of a few Palestinian children is okay, as long you hit one terrorist also. There are a few Palestinian terrorists, but if all Palestinian civilians have to be killed, then so be it. Joe, perhaps you don’t understand, the nazis killed Jews, not Palestinian civilians, that’s why it’s wrong.
Sigh. First Joe explains that all Palestinians are terrorists, then Peter allows how maybe some of them aren’t terrorists, but it’s okay to shoot them anyhow. What hole did these people crawl out of, exactly?
My comment was sarcastic. I do think killing innocent people is equivalent. It doesn’t matter if they are Jews or Palestinian civilians. I think Marduk is of the opinion that “there shall be no Holocaust other than ours” and anyone who thinks killing others is equally wrong is attacked as a jew-hater. I don’t think Joe meant all Palestinians were terrorists. Brush up on your identification of sarcasm.
Marduk talked about eradicating terrorism; Joe quickly made that equivalent to eradicating Palestinians. But most Palestinians aren’t, obviously, terrorists.
Peter is just being sarcastic — talking not in his own voice, but in that of Jews — because Peter knows what Jews really think: that it’s no big deal to kill non-terrorist Palestinians as long as it’s part of some larger operation.ُ
You have to admire the caricaturing. I mean, it’s true, anyone who thought like that would be pretty contemptible. Maybe I will, one day. In the meantime, not too much time brushing up on my sarcasm — I’m busy ducking all the straw men. I mean, anyone who thinks killing others is equally wrong is attacked as a jew-hater … is that just you recycling Joe’s all-Palestinians-are-terrorists bullshit? Or is it that you have a problem when Marduk calls people on the rhetorical substitute-Palestinians-for-terrorists, how-dare-you-insult Palestinians bait-and-switch?
Sorry, dont understand what you said.