Five Dead Jews

By Alan Caruba

For the same reason it is difficult to comprehend what will surely be a large loss of life following the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan, it is hard to grasp that, halfway through the last century, when I was a child, Nazis killed six million Jews for being Jews.

The mind rejects such insanity. We recoil from such barbarity, but we can understand what it means when a family of five is slain in their beds while they slept. That is what happened to the Fogel family in their home last Friday in the West Bank settlement of Itamar. They were killed for being Jews.

The victims were Rabbi Udi Fogel, 36, who taught at the Itamar yeshiva; his wife, Ruth Fogel, 34. Yoav, age 11. Eldad, age 4. And tiny baby, Hadas. Eldad was stabbed in the heart. His baby sister had her throat cut. The others died in a similar fashion.

Their blood-soaked bodies were found by their sister, Tamar, age 12, when she returned home that evening and mercifully spared were Roi, age 8, and Yishai, age 2, as they slept in another room.

There is a fence around Itamar, but for whatever reason, it was scaled and when the guards, alerted by a motion detector, found no evidence of a breach, they assumed some animal had set it off. They were wrong.

The animals, the killers, were a team of Hamas murderers and, when word of the murders spread throughout Gaza, candy was given out to children there to celebrate.

This occurred in an Israel now regularly called an “apartheid” nation for seeking to defend itself against a people, the so-called Palestinians, who have refused to recognize its nationhood for more than sixty years. It is a nation isolated and under attack in the United Nations despite the fact that organization supposedly exists to peacefully resolve issues, not stoke the fires of hatred as it does.

News of the murders was given a tepid rebuke by Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad who denounced “violence by any quarter” without the specificity of naming Hamas.

In a phone call to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu made it clear that terrorism was not going to restructure the settlement map on the West Bank and, to back it up, Israel announced it would authorize the construction of 500 new homes in West Bank settlements, 100 for each of the murdered Fogels.

There is a particular irony in the murder of the Fogels. They had originally lived in Gaza and had moved to Itmar in 2007 when, under former Israeli PM Ariel Sharon, they were among the Israelis who were forcibly removed by their own nation in order to provide Palestinians a strip of land on which to build a state of their own.

Instead, the Palestinians used Gaza as a forward line of war to fire hundreds, if not thousands, of rockets into Israel. It took Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 to dampen their enthusiasm for that. By then, Hamas had driven the Palestinian Authority out of Gaza at gunpoint.

DEBKAfile, an Israeli news agency, noted that the attack was “the first of its kind in years. Hamas websites hailed the murder as ‘heroic’, without taking any responsibility.”

The murders come at a time when Rep. Peter King is holding congressional hearings on the threat of radicalized Muslims in America who pose a threat to our lives. He has been attacked for putting the spotlight on this threat despite the fact that we are now almost a decade passed 9/11 and there have been the Fort Hood murders, as well as a series of attacks, planned, foiled, and near misses, in the past decade.

The Israelis are not so naïve, so fearful to face the truth about Islam in general and the Palestinians in particular. They are not so politically correct they will not say words like “terrorism” or “Islamic jihad.” They are not led by idiots like Obama’s National Security advisor who thinks the Muslim Brotherhood is a “secular” organization.

Light a candle for the Fogels. Say a prayer for the Fogels. They are your family too.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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How Are the Jews Doing?

By Alan Caruba

Wondering how the world’s Jews are doing may seem a trivial question, but I have long thought of Jews as the proverbial canary in the coal mine. When events turn nasty in the world, it is the Jews who are most often its first victims.

If there is a rise in anti-Semitism worldwide it is, frankly, hard to detect from the constant, endless background noise from those who hate Jews full-time and would be utterly bereft of any purpose in life if there were no Jews.

Sadly, Christians in the Middle East are suffering attacks that have long been familiar to Jews throughout history and, these days, the Israelis. There is no room for live-and-let-live in that region of the world where the two Islamic sects, Sunni and Shia, do not hesitate to kill one another.

When one considers that the Iranian mullahs, desperately trying to construct their own nuclear weapons, have vowed to wipe Israel off the face of the map, inquiring as to the Jews’ welfare in general and Israelis in particular is not a trivial question. A nuclear attack could easily cascade into a general exchange of such weapons, a goal the mullahs actually want to trigger.

Thomas Cahill, an Irish author, said, "The Jew gave us the Outside and the Inside - our outlook and our inner life. We can hardly get up in the morning or cross the street without being Jewish. We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes. Most of our best words, in fact - new, adventure, surprise, unique, individual, person, vocation, time, history, future, freedom, progress, spirit, faith, hope, justice - are the gifts of the Jews."

So, perhaps, in a way, we are all Jews.

In October 2010, my eye was caught by a speech by the press magnate, Rupert Murdoch, to the annual banquet of the Anti-Defamation League in New York. “We live in a world where there is an ongoing war against the Jews,” said Murdock.

This may be difficult for most Americans to comprehend because perhaps no where else in the world, other than Israel, have Jews not only prospered, but found a level of acceptance that is truly unique. In Israel, being a Jew is the ultimate definition of normality.

Murdoch, however, said that “conventional” anti-Semitism has largely failed, citing the wars against Israel since its founding in 1948. Now, said Murdock, Jews are the target of a “soft war that seeks to isolate Israel by delegitimizing it.”

This is going to be particularly evident when “Durban III”, a United Nations conference, takes place in September.

Originally called the “World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance” the UN conference name was shortened to the “World Conference Against Racism.” Suffice to say, as with most things involving the UN, the conferences have been the exact opposite of their announced purpose.

The previous Durban conference in Geneva caused European delegates to walk out when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, a keynote speaker, launched into a tirade against Israel and Jews. The Conference is recognized worldwide as a cesspool of anti-Semitism. In both conferences the hatred was directed against America as well as Israel.

Durban III will be held in New York!

It will be instructive to see if the U.S. government will send delegates to this hate fest or will officially and outspokenly protest and reject its message.

As Murdoch noted in October, there is a “curious situation we have today: Israel becomes increasingly ostracized, while Iran—a nation that makes no secret of wishing Israel’s destruction—pursues nuclear weapons loudly, proudly, and without apparent fear of rebuke.”

Murdoch said that anti-Semitism has found “a disturbing new home…in polite society, especially in Europe” and expressed concern that America was “distancing herself from the Jewish state.” He added that “the most virulent strains of anti-Semitism “come from the left”, often dressed up “as legitimate disagreement with Israel.”

He warned that Obama administration policies, generally called an outreach to the Muslim world, “Far from making peace more possible…are making hostilities more certain.”

The Iranian mullahs and their Syrian puppet have been supplying an enormous stash of rockets to Hezbollah, the Iranian's Palestinian entity in Lebanon, just as they fund and direct Hamas in Gaza. 2011 may well be a repeat of the 2006 hostilities and Israel will surely not repeat the mistakes that prolonged the last conflict.

So 2011 is yet another year in which to ask how are the Jews doing around the world.

The U.S. and its allies have been militarily engaging virulent Islamists since 9/11, but Islamist attacks predate that event by many years. The Islamist threat has spread to Europe and England, and remains active against America.

The Holocaust is a symbol and a warning of what happens when Jews or any other group is targeted for extermination. Death to America is chanted daily by some. Afterward, “genocide” entered the lexicon as the practice infected parts of Asia and Africa.

The Jews remain the most useful barometer to determine the advance or retreat of evil in the world.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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