Palestinian terrorists from Fatah murdered five members of a family on Shabbat, including a three-month-old baby. They were murdered in their sleep.
The mayor of Ariel, called a “settlement” by the world media, says that the delegitimization of settlements is the reason behind the attack. He’s wrong. It is the delegitimization of Israel that causes terror attacks, and the refusal of the world to make the Palestinians acknowledge reality: Israel isn’t going anywhere. They’re not getting the “right of return.” They’re not going to retake “al quds” [Jerusalem].
The AP is spinning the attacks, as usual, and whitewashing the attackers.
The Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, a mostly defunct Palestinian militant group, took responsibility for the attack. However, they frequently claim to be behind attacks they didn’t do in hopes of raising their profile.
Really? Defunct? That would be news to the IDF. They’re part and parcel of Fatah. Even the U.S. government acknowledges their existence.
And of course, there is the non-condemnation condemnation:
“Violence does not justify violence, we condemn it completely, whoever does it and whoever the victims are,” Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad told The Associated Press.
Note that they never actually condemn the attacks. They use the generic “violence” or talk about “state terrorism” (meaning: Israeli self-defense).
Now, though, the AP is going above and beyond. “Retaliation” has become “retribution”:
The bloody nature of the attack immediately raised concerns about Jewish retribution. Col. Nimrod Aloni, a West Bank brigade commander, said the military was preparing for possible clashes between Palestinians and settlers.
Israeli settlers sometimes carry out revenge attacks on Palestinian targets, either in retaliation for Palestinian violence or for Israeli government actions against settlers. The attacks, known as “price tag” diplomacy, include vandalism, destruction of crops or physical attacks.
Netanyahu called on all Israelis “to act with restraint and not to take the law into their own hands.”
FYI, the “retribution” so far? Angry mobs of Israelis are blocking roads and throwing stones. They are being met and stopped by soldiers. Israel polices its own. The Palestinians? Not so much.
Gaza residents are celebrating the murders and handing out sweets. It’s something they always do when innocent Israelis are murdered. And the world mostly ignores it, or worse, justifies it because the “settlers” shouldn’t be on Palestinian land.
Netanyahu blamed Palestinian incitement for the intact. He’s partly right. But in the end, it all comes down to the fact that the Palestinians think they can win. They think that the tide is turning. They see the fall of the dictators of the Middle East and the rise of Islamism, and they think their chance is near. The L.A. Times says the IDF is focusing its search on relatives of Palestinians who were killed last year during a clash with residents of Itamar. But I can’t find that sourced anywhere else. Either way, the end result is yet another example of the barbarism of terrorists, and the willingness of the world to blame the victims, in a myriad different ways. The AP:
Itamar is a small and extreme settlement that has rocky relations with the nearby Palestinian towns and villages.
The L.A. Times:
Itamar’s settlers are considered among the most fervent, believing Israel has a historic and religious right to absorb the West Bank, which Israel seized during the 1967 Middle East War.
So you see, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade is “defunct”—but those settlers, boy, are they extreme. Why, they’re so extreme, they’re being murdered in their beds by members of defunct terror groups.
Your anti-Israel media. In living color.