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Remembering Itamar
There are events that happen that clear away all pretense. Something removes all posturing and by simple virtue of its starkness reveals something for what it is. The Itamar massacre is just such an event. And on its anniversary I raise it as a issue, because people cannot forget.
The event happened six years ago on March 11. A family of five was murdered in their beds. Set all things aside: that they were an Israeli family in a West Bank settlement, that the West Bank is contested territory, that the attackers were Palestinian, and that there is an ancient grievance between Muslims and Jews.
Set all of that aside. Read the Wikipedia article. There are four words that tell you everything you need to know. Four words that remove all pretense, all posturing, all excuses, all politics, all religion, all culture. Four words that remove all things and allows you to see something plainly for what it is.
“The infant was decapitated.”
Monsters. Simply monsters.
Published in General
We should never forget.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, political or anything else gives these monsters justification – no wonder things have never been resolved. In fact, the fanatics that are creating havoc across the world have one thing in common, radical Islamic Fundamentalism and those that claim to be a religion of peace, need to deal with it and stop it. There are many other monsters in the world as well, holding their citizens hostage, communism, the dictatorship in North Korea, sex trafficking of children in Thailand, Haiti and across the world, their supposed power over innocent people, women, children, infants, they all make me sick to my stomach. I feel like this is going to be one of the hottest summers ever recorded, mark my words, not because of global warming, but because they have to widen hell and fire up the furnaces for these monsters. God is so patient with the human race.
I understand that comment and am a believer as well. You have to believe he shed some tears that day.
This goes beyond barbarism, this act is nothing less than evil. Evil must simply be destroyed, you can’t negotiate with it, reason with it, evil has to just be destroyed.
Thank you for posting this and reminding us, it’s all too easy to get comfy with our lives of plenty here, but evil still lurks out there.
I also vowed to never forget the Fogels:
Ehud (Udi), Father (36);
Ruth, Mother (35);
Children: Yoav (11), Elad (4), and Hadas (3 months).
Palestine is as close to a Culture of Evil as exists in the real world.
Yes, never forget. Never.
C.S Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters, wrote: There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.
If we forget, if we get comfy, if we ignore, then we for all practical purposes disbelieve.
The most damning and depressing statements from foreign governments involve the perceived need to add “there is no excuse for brutality …”
Really.
As if a sportscaster should marvel at a Michael Jordon dunk from the free throw line and add “more impressive when you consider he was operating against gravitational forces.”
Sadly, Itamar is already forgotten by the Blame Israel crowd in our universities and the left-wing foreign policy establishment.
Do you honestly think John Kerry ever gave Itamar a second thought during his tenure at State?
Perhaps this is why the oceans are salt water.
Never forget.
Through their continuous barbarity, the Palestinian Arabs have lost any right they may once have had to a state.
The Arabs already have 22 states, and have made a total mess out of them. Why should they have yet another to turn into hell on earth?
The Arabs should pay reparations to the Israelis for the all bloodshed they have caused and for all the land they have stolen from the Jews who have been expelled from their lands, where Jews had lived since long before the Arabs conquered those lands. Some of that money might be used to compensate individual Arabs who lost land due to a conflict that the Arabs instigated and and continue. Or they can go and pound sand–they have plenty of that.
I am deeply invested in what happens over there. When I heard about this horror, I was stunned beyond words. Today as I read your reminder, I felt the same shock. Thank you Mountie, for shining a light on this family, and on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
There is no reason,
none,
why anyone would take the side of the Palestinians in this conflict, or try to justify actions like these, except:
Jew-hatred.
“God is so patient with the human race”, @frontseatcat ?
Let’s also hope: “He will not always chide, nor will He keep His anger forever”.
What few people know is what happened in the aftermath of the Fogel murders.
It is Jewish custom that for seven days after a death, mourners visit the bereaved family and sit with them to comfort and support them, During this period, the mourners for the Fogel family were grieving in the neighbouring settlement of Neve Tzuf.
Suddenly, a car drew up at great speed. In the back seat was a young Palestinian woman in labour, but the labour had gone horribly wrong. (It turned out that the cord was round the baby’s neck.) The Palestinians said that they knew the settlers could administer excellent first aid and that the settlers had helped them in the past.
A paramedic who was there said “They know we have a skilled medical team here, and in any case of accident or injury they arrive and we help them,” he said.
The paramedic noted that on the day of the Fogel massacre, settlers saw fireworks and celebrations in nearby Palestinian communities, but added that the local medical team is committed to assisting anyone in need.
The baby was delivered safely. The Palestinian family said they were going to name her Jude.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2690079/posts
The eldest child of the Fogel family was the person who found her murdered parents and siblings, for she was out of the house at the time. Only twelve, Tamar Fogel vowed then to be a mother to her orphaned siblings.
She especially has been in my prayers for the past five years.
This essay was written one year after the murders, a testament to her and her grandparents and the power of love to nurture and heal.
Further to my previous comment (#14), I should also say that I know of stories in which Palestinians risked their lives to save Israelis. There are unthinkable horrors, such as the story of the Fogel murders, but there are also some unbelievably good people in the world, too.
I believe that the best way we could honor this family is to stop pretending it is just “a few radicals”. It is common, it is often, and it is world-wide.
In 2016, there were 2,476 Islamic attacks in 59 countries, in which 21,239 people were killed and 26,678 injured.
If a Catholic group or a Jewish group were murdering innocents on this level, do you think the Left would be calling for tolerance and compassion?
Do you think they would be calling them “religions of peace”?
Read about the 49 killed just this morning.
Here are 29 more dead this morning, for the sin of attending a wedding.
The Palestinians seem to be dedicated to arguing for their utter destruction, as if they are pleading for civilized nations to show them the wages of the Western way of war.
I don’t think they are inhuman or uniformly evil, but they train their children to hate, engage in wanton terrorism, and have the gall to be offended when the Israelis try to stop them with force. The Palestinians deserve to be oppressed and colonized.
I went there right after it happened. I wrote about it for Ricochet, here and here. It was terrible.
The world is numb to these facts.
To quote Claire in her post:
“You simply cannot look at that and think, “This story is above all about land and politics.” This story is above all about murder. They were children and they were murdered. Two more children were orphaned. The children were targeted deliberately. This was a premeditated murder–not a crime of passion or self-defense–and it was a psychotically savage crime. Anyone who in any way tries to rationalize or minimize this or to suggest that this is a fitting punishment for anything needs to go out and look at a three-month-old baby and ask himself what it would take to climb over a fence, climb in a window, and cut off that child’s head. ”
monsters
No. They deserve to be eliminated. But to say so is to argue for another final solution.
This is something that has troubled me for years. Palestinan and other jihadi cultures are so unceasingly violent, bloodthirsty, and evil in their dealings with the West, that only their removal from earth can leave their enemies (us) safe. Yet to follow such a policy would itself be a genocide.
How can there be a middle ground in such a struggle?
Destroying the culture doesn’t have to mean killing the people.
This atrocity was barely covered in British and Irish media at the time. I believe there was eventually a rare apology from the BBC for its lack of coverage. And when it was reported that dehumanising prefix “Settler” was always deployed. So while all of us here and pretty much anyone with a drop of Jewish blood (myself included) recoils at the memory of the slaughter and grieves for the murdered innocents they were long ago forgotten about by the vast majority.
No, I disagree. I support Israel; I am very aware of many barbaric acts done by Palestinians; I am scathing about Palestinian politicians. But . . . I cannot agree that the Palestinian people “deserve” anything like that.
I see the Palestinians as caught in a nightmare, very likely one of their own devising, but a nightmare nonetheless. You can put it down to culture, you can put it down to their leaders (starting with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem). They are caught up in a miasma of hatred and revenge. And yet, they are people. They are individuals. They cannot be lumped together as if they were an indistinguishable mass.
Many Palestinians celebrated the Itamar attacks. That is horrible. But it is also true that many didn’t celebrate. The culture makes it difficult and dangerous to speak out in favour of co-existence. But some do.
Some have saved the lives of Israelis, rescuing those who mistakenly wandered into dangerous areas. They have provided emergency medical treatment for Israelis in car crashes.
Many Palestinians work in Israel, some in Israeli hospitals, where they provide medical treatment for all ethnicities and all religions. There are places in the West Bank where the relations between the Palestinians and the settlers are cautiously cordial.
I suspect most Palestinians just want to live their lives and wish all the politicians would go away and leave them alone. Unfortunately, the politicians are not going anywhere.
There are just so many of these. Last week, the Henkin children were in our synagogue with their paternal grandparents. A bit more here.
When given a chance, they vote for these leaders. Today if you gave them a choice, they’d vote Hamas, whose claim to fame is that they declare themselves to be worse. Not every single one, but enough that for purposes of policy you can indeed lump them.
There are still Japanese people around, but the Imperial Japanese Militarist culture is dead, burned away in atomic fire.
The Palestinians need to be convincingly defeated. Once there can be no doubt that they have lost, it is safe to proceed. In Berlin 1945, there was no doubt that the regime was defeated. Then you can change their culture.
Coincidentally, in 2017 Jordanians celebrate the release of the perpetrator of the 1997 Island of Peace massacre of 7 Israeli girls.
Well put, Omega (and also TooShy). VDH did a column a few years back showing how in the past few hundred years of history, the only way to establish peace was by the clear defeat of one party by another.
One wishes that we had leaders so clear-sighted.