Posted on 03/09/2008 9:19:57 AM PDT by knighthawk
The pictures from Jerusalem were horrifying: Dead and injured students being wheeled out of a Jewish religious school after an Arab gunman went on a rampage. Other images were disturbing in a different way: These were the pictures of Palestinians celebrating the massacre.
They shouted jubilantly from cars and danced in the streets of Gaza. Men fired bursts of automatic weapons skyward. Some kneeled on the ground to pray. In Lebanon, crowds of Palestinians also rejoiced, with a Reuters photo showing a man holding a startled looking child in one hand and a pistol in the other.
We have gotten so numbed to the endless violence in the Mideast that we often close our minds as well as our eyes. If we have any response at all, it is something like, "Why can't those people just get along?"
The answer lies in the sickening contrast of Thursday's massacre and celebration. They can't get along because too many Palestinians embrace a culture of death. It is a culture stuck in the Dark Ages of ancient hatreds and unspeakable violence.
The evidence lies in missing pictures. Why no photos of Palestinians marching to condemn the massacre? Where are the Palestinian young people sympathizing with dead and maimed students their own age? Where are the Palestinian parents grieving for the Israeli parents who lost their children?
Unfortunately, those are the easiest questions to answer: There were no pictures of sad Palestinians because there were no marches or wide expressions of sympathy.
Apart from the obligatory disapproval mumbled by the government, there was no condemnation. More typical was a message from Hamas, the terror group: "We bless the operation. It will not be the last."
Every society has its madmen, its gangsters and killers. But in functioning societies, they are shunned and punished as an example of how not to behave.
Not so in Palestinian society or in too much of the Muslim world. Celebrations of death, as they did Thursday, soon become odes to martyrs. In less than a day, pictures of the lone gunman in the massacre appeared on posters glorifying his death. Behind his clean-shaven, ordinary face were a mosque and messages of heroic defiance.
In fairness as well as fact, most Palestinians were not in the streets celebrating. They were silent. Perhaps these "good" Palestinians are too frightened to express their disapproval of the terrorists. Or perhaps even they secretly approve of such heinous acts in the bizarre hope that they will somehow lead to peace.
Either way, how is Israel supposed to make peace with them? This is, after all, a society that perverts Mickey Mouse into a hate-spewing children's character. It turned a cuddly rabbit character into a monster who says he will "eat the Jews."
Both of those images were broadcast recently on mainstream Palestinian television. Other shows glorify songs and dance about jihad and martyrdom. Children are taught that it is their religious duty to kill themselves and as many Jews and other "infidels" as possible.
You can't really make peace with that culture. You can, as the Israelis and Americans have and must, try to broker a deal with those who nominally renounce violence and who profess a desire to live in mutual peace. It is an effort embodied in the road map and the American policy over several administrations to create a Palestinian state.
You try to forge that state, if you are the Israeli and American governments, despite the civil war between Islamic extremists and the more secular Palestinians. You try despite the barrage of rockets that come from Gaza and slam into Israeli border towns every day. You try even when the rockets get larger and slam into major Israeli cities, a literal rain of terror on civilians.
You understand the Israelis must retaliate, using their air force and superior firepower to demolish buildings where the terrorists hide among women and children. And you grieve when some of those innocents are caught in the line of fire.
Above all, as an American and an Israeli of good will, you never give up and you never give in. Because to do so is to turn the world over to those who would destroy it. That much you know.
But on days like Thursday, peace seems hopeless. For try as you can, you can never understand a culture that celebrates death.
Ping
“doom hope for peace”
Which hope ??? Who was the stupid who thought the fanatical people of Palestine want to achieve peace with their neighbor ?
I’ve been in the PA territories, and I have lost this kind of naivety.
http://leblogdrzz.over-blog.com/article-11389119.html
There never was any possibility of peace between Israel and the cretinous malcontents of islam.
Such garbage. The article started out good but ended in ‘lets keep giving my hard earned tax dollars to the Palestinians.’ I have had enough, kill them all. They are vermin and the sons and daughters are brainwashed now for at least a generation to be worse.
The onle peace the Palistineans can tolerate is the total destruction of Isreal.
bttt
Homo Sapiens without the humanity or a soul.
I'll go a step further and state for the record that Palestinians themselves doom all hope for peace. No matter how many concessions the Israelis make, no matter how much "land for peace" the Israelis sacrifice, the Palestinians keep making Islamists their figureheads and they keep conducting terrorist actions against the Israelis.
It is time that Israel put an end to this and just annihilated the terrorists in their homes, once and for all.
If anyone thinks that the Palis will change their tune in the next 300 years, I bet that I will see flying pigs with lipstick and eye shadow.
Yep according to muslims “peace” it is not “let’s be in peace” but “rest in peace”...
It’s a deadly dove...
this will always be the issue. They don’t value life.
Thanks for the ping.
Are there no Christian Palestinians that condemn this celebratory behavior?
On 9-12-01 while Israel held a day of mourning, the palestinians were dancing, celebrating and handing out candy to there offspring
“The onle peace the Palistineans can tolerate is the total destruction of Isreal.”
Even then, they’ll find someone else to kill — or each other. The Religion of Death worshippers cannot know peace. EVER.
Privately, I'm sure there are. Publicly, it's dangerous.
ML/NJ
I guess the other 10,000 Muslim celebrations of death did NOT doom peace? Good to know.
Vultures perform a useful service on the planet. An apology is in order.
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