At least four, possibly five French Jewish hostages, probably women who were shopping for the Sabbath, were killed by Jihadists before the French police stormed the kosher supermarket. The male and female pair of jihadists were demanding the freedom of the Charlie Hebdo jihadists.
Simultaneously, the police also stormed the building in north Paris where the Charlie Hebdo jihadists were holding a hostage; they apparently freed that hostage and killed the terrorists.
I am launching a #Je Suis Juif hashtag, not only in honor of these latest Jewish victims, but in honor of all the Jewish victims whose deaths have met with the hashtag world’s indifference.
Yesterday, a colleague challenged me. She agreed that the murder of twelve French journalists was horrendous– barbaric– but she was bitter and was not going to be using the hashtag “#Je Suis Charlie Hebdo.”
And why not?
Because, she said, no one had created hashtags or marches on behalf of any of the many Israeli Jewish civilians, women, children, the elderly, who were targeted and murdered by Islamic terrorists. No one had agreed to “ride the buses” the year that terrorist were blowing them up in Jerusalem.
I told her she had a point but I asked her to consider this: The Jews are often the first to model the future, the first to model how to respond to a situation. If the world callously looks away, if people believe that the sacrifice of the Jews will save all the non-Jews; if the world does not learn to identify with the plight of Jews—the world will reap a similar whirlwind.
Ironically, France gave asylum to Arafat and his family and the government behaved with enormous respect towards him and his murderous enterprise. This, and other grievous appeasements, have not spared France from a raging Intifada launched by its Muslim citizens.
I also told my colleague that the Jews have a sacred mission; withdrawing entirely unto themselves, refusing to understand their role in humanity’s drama, is not entirely “Jewish.”
Today, I think my colleague has a point. Today, two more Muslim terrorists were holding civilians hostage in a French kosher supermarket. I assumed these people were Jews. So far, we know that at least four have been killed. This pair of Jihadists were demanding the safe release of the two terrorists being sought in the murder of the Charlie Hebdo journalists.
Today, I am waiting for people to launch the hashtag: “Je suis Juif.”
I am waiting for France to make the connection between “Israel,” and “humanity,” to comprehend that Israel is a symbol for the West; to understand that Arab Jews and Arab Christians were at the mercy of such Muslim barbarians for millennia; that the state of Israel “provoked” the age-old Islamic hatred of infidels and that the Jihad against the Jews has been going on since the beginning of the 20th century.
A sovereign Jewish state has “provoked” those Muslim terrorists who believe that the entire world should be Muslim and ruled by Sharia law. And, the Western world is now in their gun-sights.
In the last fourteen years, non-Israeli Jews, French Jews, have been mocked, followed, literally tortured, stabbed, raped, robbed, shot down, stoned, and blown up. And today, they are being held hostage in a Kosher supermarket in France.
Today, I am a Jew, “#Je Suis Juif.”