Howard Epstein – THE FRENCH HORROR STORY – CONTINUED
Two weeks ago, I wrote these lines:-
What happened in France last Thursday evening is utterly shocking to all right-thinking people. It is, however, unlikely that anybody empathizes with the French today more keenly than the Israelis; but we do so with an added layer of grief that is peculiar to us. We could simply say “I told you so”, but our reaction is much more nuanced than that.
I complained that western correspondents understood the brutality of machines being used to mow down people but not when it occurs in Israel.
Today, we read of a Catholic priest being killed in his church in France and I make the like observation: western correspondents understand the brutality of people being murdered in their places of worship but not when it occurs in Israel.
In November 2014, two Palestinians murdered six in a Jerusalem synagogue (including one who died within a year after the attack and a Druze police officer). General condemnation by the Europeans came there none. Instead, we recently witnessed the nauseating sight of members of the European Parliament giving Abu Mazen a half-minute standing ovation when he spouted his customary anti-Semitic drivel about well-poisoning.
Today, learning of the slitting of the throat of the 84 year old priest while forced to kneel at his altar, I am prompted to write:-
It is unlikely that anybody empathizes with the French today more keenly than the Israelis; but we do so with an added layer of grief that is peculiar to us. We could simply say “I told you so”, but our reaction is much more nuanced than that.
Seen from Israel, the terrorism now afflicting Europe appears (whilst wholly-unjustifiable, of course) in some ways self-induced. Have the Euros never heard of “copy-cat killing”?
For over 40 years, the Euros have funded the Sunni Palestinians. …. Much of the money remitted from Europe was “invested” in terror, some of it reported in the West but most not – the victims were not Europeans but “only” Jews.
The Euros have sown the seeds of this and they now reap the whirlwind.
Still they do not see it. President Francois Hollande, appropriately quick to grieve over lives lost in Nice and Rouen was undetectable in his vicarious grief, had he felt any, when the Pals killed Jews in their synagogue.
I continued:-
Decades ago, just as every Western leader (as with Hollande again today) says after every terrorist attack: we shall never give in to terror, the Euros should have told their Palestinian clients that Israel, too, would never give into terror. Democracies just don’t do that.
The Euros should have made it clear to the Pals that the Euros would not continue to fund their terror, if only because it would be a waste of money as an instrument to gain concessions from the Israelis. And the Euros should have said that they expected their Palestinian dependents to make peace with the only democratic state in the Middle East, and deal with it not through terror but by negotiation.
Had they done that, perhaps terrorism on the streets and in places of worship would not have become prosaic and the French, in the vanguard of the European toadying up to the Palestinians, might not be seeing this bloody return on their investment in them.
© Howard Epstein July 2106
Howard Epstein’s book: Guns, Traumas and Exceptionalism: America in the Twenty-First Century is now available on Kindle.
