Incitement and Murder
A short while ago, a family of five Israelis was murdered in their West Bank home. According to the Associated Press, citing Israel’s YNet news website, “The family — including an 11-year-old, a 3-year-old and an infant — was all stabbed in their sleep…”
The infant was reportedly one month old.
The brutal attack comes only days after a West Bank Palestinian youth center announced a soccer tournament named after Wafa Idris, the first female Palestinian suicide bomber, who killed an 81-year-old man and injured over 100 other Israelis.
The glorification of this suicide bomber, though, was virtually ignored by Western media outlets, many of whom did find time to report, in great detail, on the first home game by the Palestinian national soccer team.
The latter event makes for an interesting human interest story. The former helps explain why peace has been so elusive in the Middle East. It’s likely that the terrorist who wiped out the family knew of the soccer tournament named after Wafa Idris. And if not he — or she — certainly knew that scores of other suicide bombers have been lauded as heroes by the Palestinian government and media. The killer undoubtedly internalized the message, reinforced time and time again, that it’s noble and heroic to kill Jews. The same goes for the person who planned the attack, and the one who transported the killer, and any other enablers.
We’ve seen in the past that Western pressure can help convince Palestinians to scale back incitement. Late last year, for example, a Palestinian government website posted a report claiming that Judaism has no relation to the Western Wall, the holiest Jewish place of worship. After the Obama administration condemned the report, it was pulled from the site. (It later resurfaced on the official website of the Palestinian Authority news agency.)
By ignoring this type of incitement, though, Western press makes such pressure unlikely, or impossible. After all, we can’t protest against incitement that we don’t know about. And so the incitement continues. And so does the killing.
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