Judi Rudoren’s October 17th New York Times article, East Jerusalem, Bubbling Over With Despair, which bemoans the “frustration” of Palestinians engaged in a paroxysm of murder is an object lesson in how Western journalists misconstrue the current violence plaguing the Middle East –misrepresenting and excusing the nature of the current slaughter of Jews to the cries of “Allahu Akhbar”.
First, Rudoren tacitly adopts the perspective of a would-be murderer, insinuating that the authorities might have it all wrong – as she laments the ill-fated “18-year-old college student whose residency is being revoked by Israel after the police said she stabbed a Jewish man in the back”. Yes, this young woman –who was filmed on CCTV as she stalked a man walking into the Old City until she had the opportunity to plunge a knife into the back of his neck– was a college student. Hardly a desperate victim of circumstance. Note that after this young scholar’s victim repelled his attacker, but did not shoot to kill at point-blank range, both the assailant and her victim were treated by Israeli paramedics.
Next, Rudoren introduces us to another seething victim of Israeli oppression. Per Rudoren’s description Mr. Abu Hamed, 44, “is a lecturer at Hebrew University” and “a successful businessman” who “runs two clinics in Israel’s health system, and lives in a comfortable home among Sur Baher’s tangle of crowded hills.” Rudoren adds that “the view from Abu Hamed’s balcony is of sprawling Jewish enclaves that he said were ‘built on our lands,’ and the ugly barrier Israel erected that splits Sur Baher from the occupied West Bank”. Well, if that doesn’t make one’s blood boil and justify hacking up Jews walking in the Old City, I don’t know what would. For Rudoren, though, aesthetics apparently trumps saving lives. Someone might remind her that the “ugly barrier” was erected as an effective deterrent to the wave of suicide bombings that characterized the last “uprising” (read:” ‘Palestinian murder spree justified by “despair”).
Rudoren handily obfuscates the real motivation and utter brutality of the attacks – which were inaugurated when a Hamas cell machine-gunned Eitam and Naama Henkin in front of their four young children but broke off (leaving the youngsters alive) when the murderers shot one of their own and had to repair to a hospital. Perhaps the news cycle where Abu Mazen accused Jews of defiling Al Aqsa with their “filthy feet” was just beyond the reaches of Jodi’s memory. But that can’t be, because Rudoren actually traces this round of killing to “July 2014, when Jewish extremists kidnapped and murdered Muhammad Abu Khdeir, a 16-year-old from the Shuafat neighborhood.” Well, if we’re going to go there, Jodi might recall that Israeli public –across the board– swiftly and unequivocally condemned this murder – even as it followed on the heels of Hamas’ brutal kidnap/murder of three Jewish teenagers … that was tumultuously celebrated in Palestinian social media and PA controlled media, as well. And perhaps this is the true crux of the matter. Because Palestinian murder is consistently excused or ignored by the Western media even as it is celebrated by large sections of Palestinian and even Arab-Israeli society, which lionize its perpetrators as “martyrs” and “heroes.”
As Rudoren might also remember, two Fatah factions raced to claim “credit” for the Henkin murders – with utter silence from Abu Mazen – and without challenge from Hamas. When Abu Mazen spoke of a unity government in his UN speech, perhaps he was signaling more than anyone cared to consider. While Rudoren and others in the media cannot bring themselves to admit that the current carving up of elderly Jews on buses or children in candy stores could have a much darker motivation than territorial dispute, that is no justification for excusing such behavior with the suggestion that “the violence is a consequence of years of feeling like the neglected stepchildren of both City Hall and the Palestinian Authority.” That proposition is as off-target as it is offensive. These are not faceless, “random” assaults by disenfranchised have-nots– any more than the murder of Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris involved a “bunch of folks” who were “randomly” shot by a “zealot”, to recall President Obama’s bizarre characterization of events. No, when the Palestinian Bar Association awards an honorary law degree to a 19-year-old Palestinian student who knifed to death two Israeli civilians in Jerusalem’s Old City something indescribably darker is going on.