Palestine: The Psychotic Stage

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Bret Stephens:

If you’ve been following the news from Israel, you might have the impression that “violence” is killing a lot of people. As in this headline: “Palestinian Killed As Violence Continues.” Or this first paragraph: “Violence and bloodshed radiating outward from flash points in Jerusalem and the West Bank appear to be shifting gears and expanding, with Gaza increasingly drawn in.”

Read further, and you might also get a sense of who, according to Western media, is perpetrating “violence.” As in: “Two Palestinian Teenagers Shot by Israeli Police,” according to one headline. Or: “Israeli Retaliatory Strike in Gaza Kills Woman and Child, Palestinians Say,” according to another.

Such was the media’s way of describing two weeks of Palestinian assaults that began when Hamas killed a Jewish couple as they were driving with their four children in the northern West Bank. Two days later, a Palestinian teenager stabbed two Israelis to death in Jerusalem’s Old City, and also slashed a woman and a 2-year-old boy. Hours later, another knife-wielding Palestinian was shot and killed by Israeli police after he slashed a 15-year-old Israeli boy in the chest and back.

Other Palestinian attacks include the stabbing of two elderly Israeli men and an assault with a vegetable peeler on a 14-year-old. On Sunday, an Arab-Israeli man ran over a 19-year-old female soldier at a bus stop, then got out of his car, stabbed her, and attacked two men and a 14-year-old girl. Several attacks have been carried out by women, including a failed suicide bombing.

Regarding the causes of this Palestinian blood fetish, Western news organizations have resorted to familiar tropes. Palestinians have despaired at the results of the peace process—never mind that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas just declared the Oslo Accords null and void. Israeli politicians want to allow Jews to pray atop the Temple Mount—never mind that Benjamin Netanyahu denies it and has barred Israeli politicians from visiting the site. There’s always the hoary “cycle of violence” formula that holds nobody and everybody accountable at one and the same time.

Left out of most of these stories is some sense of what Palestinian leaders have to say. As in these nuggets from a speech Mr. Abbas gave last month: “Al Aqsa Mosque is ours. They [Jews] have no right to defile it with their filthy feet.” And: “We bless every drop of blood spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah.”

Then there is the goading of the Muslim clergy. “Brothers, this is why we recall today what Allah did to the Jews,” one Gaza imam said Friday in a recorded address, translated by the invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute, or Memri. “Today, we realize why the Jews build walls. They do not do this to stop missiles but to prevent the slitting of their throats.”

Then, brandishing a six-inch knife, he added: “My brother in the West Bank: Stab!”

Imagine if a white minister in, say, South Carolina preached this way about African-Americans, knife and all: Would the news media be supine in reporting it? Would we get “both sides” journalism of the kind that is pro forma when it comes to Israelis and Palestinians, with lengthy pieces explaining—and implicitly justifying—the minister’s sundry grievances, his sense that his country has been stolen from him?

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The Wall Street Journal is pointing out something that’s been going on for years against Israel.
But what the New York Times did recently was worse.

This ”story” has been re-edited so many times now that who knows if original quotes from it are still in it or not.
But the crux of it was that the NYTimes published a story that there was NO archeological proof that the Jews EVER had any temple on the temple Mount!
They have (through edits) backed off of that absurdity.
But that was the whole story at the first version of this story.

What the Times did was simply parrot an Arab myth found in many writings (of Muslims) that Jews never had a temple there.

What had zero evidence is the story Muslims tell:
The Dome of the Rock is supposedly sacred to Islam because it is the spot from which Mohammed ascended into heaven. There is a small indentation in the rock, which allegedly was created by Mohammed’s heel as he ascended. Mohammad says (in the Koran) that he got there (to the place furthest in the west) while asleep on a flying horse, so, you know, really????

@Nanny G: When will the NYT run a story claiming the Holocaust never happened? Fact is, the “tolerant left” has always hated Israel and the Jewish homestead there. Though the left always seems to pick the side that is stirring up trouble (even when in the form of murder, violence and terror) and justify it by some lame rationale.

Controlling the media, they can make whatever headline they think will most effectively stir up anti-Jewish sentiment. Is it any surprise that the violence only suddenly ramped up, coincidentally after Obama handed the Iranians billions of dollars? Is this mentioned in the media? Worst of all, the left-wing supported Iranians don’t even care how connected it all appears. They can just lie their way out of it and the left wing media, in order to continue their blind support of Obama, will cover their tracks.

Muslims in Israel, West Bank and Gaza are intent on starting a ”3rd intafada.”
But Israelis have relaxed their open carry laws so that private citizens can carry publicly.
Also police and reserves have been called up, increasing the numbers of security at spots Muslims traditionally target.
Yesterday a Hebron Muslim set himself on fire while trying to throw a Molotov Cocktail at Israelis.
Our Lefty media called him a ”protester.”
No.
Once you are throwing fireballs at people you have become a terrorist.
Police are also thwarting more attempted attacks including a couple yesterday and a couple today.
Some of the time the would-be attackers live, sometimes they die.
It seems to depend on when they surrender, if at all.