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Tuvia Yanai Weissman הי"ד, in the photo with his wife and baby,
was murdered tonight. The "achievement" of the Palestinian
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Campaigns of that sort - this one for instance - have become commonplace as the savagery continues.
As the case of the 14 year-old boy who participated in a vicious knifing attack in Pisgat Zeev ["12-Nov-15: What about Palestinian Arab terror gives it that unique savagery?"] a few months ago shows, this is true even when the children have carried out acts of extreme violence that have ended up costing Israeli lives. Murder, in other words.
This is a reflection of attitudes that we think are not well understood and that cause huge damage to those doing it and to the societies in which they operate.
Consider what we wrote in previous posts including "19-Jan-16: Children with knives and what they destroy", 11-Nov-15: When child abuse is a national mission" and "11-Oct-15: Weaponizing children".
The people behind those campaigns claim they do it in the name of human rights. With straight faces, they assert that they stand for the rights of children who ought to be allowed to live their lives because children are by nature innocent and charming.
This is ludicrous.
Palestinian Arab society - at all levels - is doing something hideous to its own children, as we keep noting in this blog. The right response is condemnation and rejection of their bigoted politics masquerading as something higher and nobler.
Tonight's murderous attack by a pair of knife-armed Arab boys ended in the death of one of their victims. Those boys already appear tonight, a few hours after the horror they brought into an Israeli supermarket, on widely distributed posters proclaiming their heroism in Arabic and across the social media.
As sick as this is, the focus on the killers is only part of the story. It's the part we and other civilized people can influence the least.
The other part is the way the Israeli victims are forgotten, consigned to be mere statistics and quickly discarded by the relentless news cycle and by terror-fatigued, apathetic onlookers.
About this, we can do something.
For them, and for ourselves, we want people to see the young man of 21 - a husband and father - whose life and the promising future of his young family were brutally stolen tonight by two manipulated Palestinian Arab youths. (The wedding video of the young couple was posted to YouTube two years ago, and has been widely viewed in the past hours.) We know it's unlikely the mainstream news-reporting media will pay attention to Tuvia Yanai Weissman's life and his death. That's why we must.
We want people for whom human rights are a genuine value to observe how the "achievement" of the killers is already being celebrated tonight in Palestinian Arab villages and mosques via a myriad of different forms of incitement. It's going on in full force as we write these words: the marketing of murder; the cynical camouflaging of vile hatred; the ongoing brain-washing.
We pray that this becomes understood for the sake of those other Arab children who have not yet taken up a knife or a meat cleaver or a gun.
And also for the sake of our own lives and communities.
UPDATE February 21, 2016: We are grateful, and not for the first time, to Malgorzata Koraszewska and the editorial team at the influential Polish website Listy z naszego sadu (literally "Letters from our orchard") where a Polish-language translation of "Remembering the savages, forgetting the victims" appears today. Ms Koraszewska writes:
We added (from the editor) a short note about the total amount of Israelis killed in this horrible "knife intifada" with a picture of Dafne Meir and information who she was and how she died defending her children. The Israeli victims of this terror are almost never mentioned in Polish mainstream media.Sadly, Poland is not the only place where that is true.
