A view from the other side. Such propaganda is, alas, fueled by leftist equivocation on terrorism—as we have noted before. From the Jewish World Review, July 26:
What the world owes ‘Palestinians’ and their ideological benefactorsBy Dennis Prager
In the last few weeks, innocent men, women and children have been blown up, paralyzed, brain damaged and otherwise had their lives ruined by Muslim suicide bombers in Britain, Egypt and Iraq.
Who can we thank for this man-made plague? Palestinians and the Left.
We need to thank Palestinians for their major contribution to humanity — religiously sanctioned mass murder of innocents through suicide. Prior to the Palestinians, this did not exist.It is true that Tamil suicide bombers in Sri Lanka have murdered many thousands and they are not Muslims. But the Tamil rationale for suicide terror — though utterly immoral — is confined to a (secular) nationalist movement in Sri Lanka. Palestinian Muslims — no Palestinian Christians have committed a suicide bombing — have created a religious and moral basis for mass murder and did so within a worldwide religion with a billion adherents. When the Palestinians sent brainwashed young men to blow themselves up in Israeli buses, cafes and discos, they offered justifications that provided the basis for many others to do the same.
They said that blowing up Jews in Israel — of any age and in any location — was an act that glorified Allah, that one who engaged in such atrocities was a Muslim equivalent to a saint, and would be rewarded in heaven by many beautiful virgins. I do not know of any Muslim religious organization or leader who condemned this Palestinian Muslim terror-theology as anti-Islamic.
Judea Pearl, the father of murdered Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl, has devoted his life since his son’s murder by Muslims in Pakistan to building bridges to the Muslim world. He told me on my radio show that he is sad to report that “99.99 percent” of the Muslim world does not believe that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state. It is no wonder, then, that so few Muslims religiously or morally condemned Palestinian terror against Israeli Jews. At best, some Palestinians condemn Palestinian terror as counterproductive to the Palestinian cause. Period. It may be impractical, but not immoral or un-Islamic.
What therefore happened was that the religious justification for murdering innocent people took hold in the Muslim world. It apparently never occurred to Muslim leaders that once you justify evil, that evil will eventually be unleashed against you, too. If blowing up Jewish children is OK, so is blowing up Egyptian, Moroccan, Iraqi, British, Spanish and Russian children.
And that is where the Left comes in. They have provided the secular and universal justification for Palestinian Islamic terror against Jews.
According to the world’s Left, it’s OK for Palestinians to put bombs in an Israeli student cafeteria because:
1. Israel occupies Palestinian land (even though a leftist Israeli government offered 97 percent of it to Yasser Arafat)
2. Therefore, Palestinians are engaging in legitimate resistance
3. Since Palestinians don’t have sophisticated weaponry, they use their weapon, the suicide bomber
4. Israelis kill Palestinian civilians, so there is a moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians (even though the Palestinians target Jewish innocents and the Israelis do not target Palestinian innocents)
But, alas, the anti-Israel Left (an almost redundant description), too, did not understand the genie it had helped unleash onto the world. Why is it all right for Muslims to blow up Israeli children, but not Russian children? Israeli buses, but not British buses? Jews in Israel, but not Muslims in Iraq?
Actually, for many on the Left, it is all right. The socialist mayor of London himself blames the terror in his city on British support for America and Israel, not on Islamic terror-theology.
Like London’s mayor, the Left around the world blames Israel for the Palestinian suicide bombers, and blames America for those in Iraq. Without the Left around the world, the Palestinian G-d-based mass murder through suicide would have been an isolated phenomenon, universally condemned as the evil it is.
And who is to blame for the Muslim terror in other Muslim countries such as Morocco and Egypt? Here, the leftist and Muslim apologists for Palestinian terror enter cognitive dissonance. The next time you read of men, women and children blown apart by a young Muslim praising Allah, you can thank Palestinians and the Left.
Comments, anybody?
(See also our last post on the politics of Islamic terrorism.)
