Jews Are Still the Canary
In “How to Stop Mass Casualty Terror Attacks: Take Violence against Jews Seriously,” published last December in Tablet, Liel Leibovitz observed that Western leaders, media and analysts have long been willing to justify murderous violence against Jews as somehow “justified” or at least “understandable.”
The piece, now even more clearly on point in the wake of the recent terrorist attacks in Brussels, explains of this mindset:
It’s the logic of deluded men and women who are trying to organize a chaotic world into rational patterns and who are therefore willing to accept the indiscriminate slaughtering of Jews as somehow understandable, the consequence of some ancient blood feud having to do with a land and a faith far removed from the daily realities of most well-heeled westerners. To that crowd, the murder of a Jew is deplorable but rarely surprising; real shock is expressed only when the very same terrorists, literally speaking, who have orchestrated the killing of Jews turn their guns on other Belgians or Parisians or New Yorkers.
To the many—in government, in the media, in academia—who still hold this morally repugnant worldview, to those who endanger the well-being of us all by failing to seriously investigate and prosecute attacks on Jews because these can somehow be explained away by some imaginary rationale, it’s time to say no more. Understand this: The very same people who are coming for the Jews will soon come for you, too.
Every father who is killed on a road in the West Bank in front of his children, every old man who is stabbed in Jerusalem with a pair of scissors, will be killed again in Paris, in Hanover, in Washington. Terror doesn’t know any national boundaries. It doesn’t care about anyone’s religion. It couldn’t care less about the nuances of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. Terror is a technique for attaining power, and it has its own logic, which is the logic of indiscriminate death. Jews are merely this demented logic’s first victims, but they are not, by a long shot, its last.
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