Ignoring Terrorism Against Jews Will Lead to More Against Everyone

Abraham Cooper
Harold Brackman

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In Judaism, every single life — imbued with a spark of the divine — is of infinite value. This is why, according to Jewish tradition, Adam was created alone: because the entire world was created for the sake of a single human being.

In the last century, racist Nazism railed against the Judeo-Christian concepts of justice and mercy, and almost succeeded in not only extinguishing 6 million Jewish lives — but in erasing Jewish life and values. By the time Hitler was stopped, tens of millions of people had perished across the globe.

Today’s world is plagued by the universal scourge of Islamist terrorism. Al Qaeda, ISIS, al Shabab, et al. wage war on the very same humane values the Nazis mocked and defamed — this time in the name God.

From hijackings, to suicide bombers, to vehicular slaughter, Jews — specifically Israeli Jews — were often the first victims of contemporary terror. But they have hardly been the last. Indeed, Muslims, Christians and Hindus, not just Jews, now find themselves targeted online and in real life by genocidal jihadists.

The immoral actions of these thugs should have provided the civilized world with a moment of moral clarity: We are all in this war together. Yeah right.

As was recently reported:

In the same week that jihadist terrorists, slit the throat of an 84-year old Cleric in a Normandy Church, several local councils in France forwarded an initiative to grant honorary citizenship to convicted Palestinian terrorist, Marwhan Barghouti. Barghouti is one of the founders of the Tanzim terror group. He was convicted on five counts of murder in 2002 and is presently serving five consecutive life terms in Israeli jail. He is responsible for planning numerous terror attacks and is credited with inciting the second Intifada. Bargouti is unrepentant and continues to incite violence from his prison cell.

In fact, many European countries reeling from Islamist terrorism — from Belgium to France, to Germany and Scandinavia — continue to pour millions of dollars into Palestinian entities that celebrate and validate terrorism against Jews.

Meanwhile, a New York Times roundup features an “endless stream of terror attacks. Orlando and Beirut. Paris and Nice and St. Etienne-du-Rouvray, France. Germany and Japan and Egypt. Each bomb or bullet tearing holes in homes and communities.”

Neither the recent shooting attack at Tel Aviv’s Sarona Market claiming four lives, nor the knifing to death of a 13-year-old Israeli-American teen, were mentioned.

As someone else pointed out, it’s also “hard to forget how President Obama characterized the Jewish victims of the HyperCacher Kosher Market attack in Paris, on the heels of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, as ‘random’ individuals when, in fact, the whole point of the terrorist attack was to target Jews.”

Don’t Jewish lives matter?

Equating Jews with vermin, as a Georgia Congressman recently did, hasn’t been done since Nazi Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer newspaper did it on a daily basis in the 1930s.

Whatever one’s position in the debate over Jewish communities in territories captured by Israel in the 1967 war, it is dead wrong to treat the terrorist murder of Jews differently than any other terror outrage — whether in West Bank towns once walked by the biblical patriarchs or in Tel Aviv cafes or outside a Synagogue in a European capital. It’s not only morally wrong, it’s practically and politically self-defeating to the point of being suicidal. If terrorism pays off in the Holy Land, it will only spawn more recruits for the Jihadists globally.

Simon Wiesenthal, who lost 89 members of his family in the Holocaust, issued this warning three decades ago: “History teaches us that Jews are often the first victims; they are never the last victims.”

Offering up Israelis to the Moloch of Terrorism just won’t work. European leaders especially should reflect on Winston Churchill’s insightful quip: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat it last.”

If there is any hope of defeating ISIS and their compatriots, humanity needs wall-to-wall religious and political leaders with the courage to say no to all terrorism — whatever its cause and whomever it targets.

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