Motley Moose – Archive

Six Jews in custody and two Palestinians on the lam are child murderers. They committed their actions with the intent to inflame and incite and destroy. They knew the responses that would come from their actions. They knew that others would fight and die. They knew that children in Sderot and Gaza would find themselves ducking for cover. They knew that the consequences of their actions would be far beyond the four innocent lives taken by their own hands.

I am a passionate Zionist. 2,000 years of the history of my people have taught me one thing: We cannot trust our safety to others. The only way that we can be safe is to have our own country. Exiles and expulsions and forced conversions and blood libels and claims of deicide and pogroms and finally the Holocaust have taught us this lesson. A world without Israel is one that is not safe for the Jewish People.

It is folly to say that because of the actions of the six people an entire nation is to be condemned. It is folly to say that because certain current leaders are not ideal an entire nation is to be condemned. By that measure each and every nation in this world is to be condemned. The United States for what happened here during the Civil Rights Era; Israel for the murder of an innocent teen; the Palestinians never to have a state for the murder of three boys. The application of such logic is absolute madness.

The only logical solution is two states for two peoples. That, however, is a discussion for another day. Right now, I want to keep focus on the immediate issue – the child murderers that have started and sustained the current violence.

I do not care what their nationality or their ethnicity or their religion is. They have deliberately murdered children and they have done so with the absolute worst of intentions for they see these murders as a beginning. They wish to provoke exactly what has occurred. They have the blood of all those innocents that will be killed and injured on their hands. It does not matter who started it, for they all share in continuing the cycle of violence.

We all breathe the same air and we all bleed the same red blood. In the cases of these murders they have the same necks that will break and the same spinal cords that will sever. Yes, it is harsh, but this is exactly the punishment that all these child murderers deserve. Let them hang from the same gallows at the same time. Their crimes are the same side of the same coin and they deserve the same punishment. The world will be a much better place without the presence of such monsters (And for those of you that are anti-death penalty, I would be okay with a sentence of life without parole and a promise that they would never be released, including as part of any kind of prisoner exchange).

My heart is in my throat. For the last few years (as I’ll demonstrate below) I’ve seen real hatred take root and both Europe and the US. As I wrote a Daily Beast piece about the horrific killing of an off duty soldier in London last week, I was expecting it. But the hundreds of nasty, ignorant hateful comments underneath only confirmed something I’ve seen for years now – phrased less execrably on respectable blogs, by respectable oommentators:

The crass generalities and cultural stereotypes  of Islamophobia have become a normal and acceptable form of current discourse in most public debate.

Words lead to actions. In the aftermath of the killing of Drummer Rigby by two Brits with Nigerian backgrounds – there have been over 200 attacks on Muslims, Mosques and threats of violence

There was nothing like this in 1982, when the IRA killed 16 soldiers in the Mall. There was nothing like this in France, when a lone gunman killed shot French soldiers a few years ago.

A politically acceptable form of bigotry, whipped up the the papers, and given validation by countless intellectuals is now spilling over in backlash much worse than the inciting incident.

Below the follow I’ll link back and quote to some of the previous pieces I wrote on this terrifying phenomenon over the two years ago. I urge all responsible progressives to fight this new tide of hatred – combat its lies and exaggerations – before it’s too late.  

In the real world, the deliberate targeting of clinics where women seek to exercise a constitutional right is called terrorism.  In the world of Fox News contributor Kirsten Powers, it is not (h/t Media Matters):

Just b/c the bombing suspects were Muslim, that doesn’t make it ‘terrorism’ any more than a crazy abortion clinic bomber is a terrorist.

– Kirsten Powers (@kirstenpowers10) April 19, 2013)

And, as Media Matters points out:

The intent behind this tweet isn’t immediately clear, but the message it conveys — that an anti-abortion zealot who sets off a bomb inside of an abortion clinic is not a terrorist — is absolutely false. The FBI treats attacks against abortion service providers as acts of terrorism and anti-abortion movements that resort to violence as terrorist groups.