You have seen the news about the terrorist attack in the yeshiva in Jerusalem last Thursday.  Eight students were murdered by a Palestinian who fired between 500 and 600 bullets in the seminary library; two of the victims were 15, two were 16, two were 18 and one was 26.  Eight students planning celebrations for Purim gunned down only because they were Jewish and they were in Israel.  It invoked memories of the shootings last spring on the campus of Virginia Tech, students going about their normal lives brutally slaughtered by a madman—only yesterday’s shooting was not by a madman, it was by a murderous terrorist.

 

This normally would be yet another case of terror by Palestinian and Islamic terrorists twisted by their view of the world that makes it okay to target and murder innocent women and children for their “cause.”  The news would upset me and I would ponder the dark morass of character that leads someone to such acts but then I would move on.  Today I cannot not comment on this tragedy, not just because of the scope of the terror, but because of the reaction to it.

 

The spokesman for the terrorist group Hamas, Sami Abu Zuhri, said after the murders that Hamas “blesses the heroic operation in Jerusalem.”  In Gaza, thousands poured into the streets firing guns and celebrating the cold blooded murder of eight students—two that were 15, two that were 16, two that were 18, a 19 year old and a 26 year old.  Students in a library preparing a celebration of a holiday celebrating the delivery of the Jewish people from annihilation in Persia—one of many attempts throughout the centuries to exterminate the Jewish faith, culture and people were themselves annihilated.  Hamas and many Palestinians, and many in our own country, feel the murders justified, excused and deserving.  Despicable.

 

Any individual, group, culture, society, religion or nation that in any way condones, justifies, excuses, rationalizes this act suffers from severe moral depravity.  There will be those who try to use some moral equivalence of the constant attack and murder by Palestinians and Islamic extremists of children, bombings of busses, rockets fired at schools, attacks on Muslims traveling on a pilgrimage, using mentally retarded women and children to explode bombs in market with actions by the United States and Israel.  Somehow the celebration in the streets of Gaza or the West Bank after the murder of eight children or the murder of several thousand innocent Americans on 9/11 will be grossly twisted and confused to somehow be justified or reasonable.  Any words or actions to this end define moral depravity and a lack of what is right and what is wrong.  “Heroic?”  Try disgusting, cowardly, despicable, depraved, tortured.   “Heroic?” No more than Timothy McVeigh or David Berkowitz or Jeffrey Dahmer or Adolph Hitler or Joseph Stalin or Pol Pot.

 

The reactions by Hamas and others celebrating this crime against humanity should strengthen our resolve to win the war on terror, to find and eradicate those hiding behind religion as a reason to murder innocent civilians and a stated purpose of wiping out not only Israel but the United States and all culture and peoples who do not believe in their version of Islam.  They are terrorists, they are murderers and they are dangerous and need to be eliminated.

 

Two were 15, two were 16, two were 18, one was 19 and one was 26.  They were planning a celebration.

 

 

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