On Friday night, in the Israeli town of Itamar, two Palestinian terrorists broke into a house and murdered five members of the family who lived there. We are talking about the slaughter, in cold blood, of a father, a mother, and three children, including slitting the throat of a three-month-old baby girl.
In response Israelis did not take to the streets attacking Palestinian passersby. Nor did they burn cars, break windows, loot, or the usual response we see from the Arab street. No, what the Israeli government did is a thousand times worse. Or at least it is in the eyes of the vaunted New York Times.
Israel has decided in the face of barbarism to build. Yes, that’s right. Build. Not concentration camps or torture rooms, not even military bases, but houses.
In the eyes of the New York Times this is a sin of gargantuan proportions. A newspaper that isn’t even able to describe the act of killing innocent children as terror sees the building of houses as the main impetus to the non-existent “Peace Process.”
“Israel said Sunday it has approved building hundreds of settler homes after five members of an Israeli family — including three children — were knifed to death as they slept in a West Bank settlement over the weekend.
The attack and the government’s response threatened to drive Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking even further out of reach. Israel, which blames the attack on Palestinian militants, is liable to set aside an emerging peace initiative it planned to propose, while the planned construction of new settler homes deepened Palestinian mistrust.”
Of course, killing children doesn’t deepen Israeli mistrust, or shouldn’t because clearly Israel is the only side culpable in the ongoing conflict.
That isn’t enough, of course, for the New York Times; it has to go out of its way to demonize those killed while absolving the killers of guilt. The family killed is referred to as “some of Israel’s most radical settlers,” yet the animals who killed them are members of a mostly defunct militant group that sometimes takes credit for attacks they didn’t commit.
Of course, the paper of record feels the need to misquote PA President Mahmoud Abbas, saying he condemned the killings. The truth is, Abbas made a generic condemnation of violence on both sides.
To end its reporting on the murder of innocents the NYT once more feels the need to lay all the blame on Israeli intransigence as the only cause for the lack of peace in the region. Obviously, they have forgotten the last 15 years of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. All the times that Israeli governments have offered the Palestinians 90% or more of their demands, yet were always turned down. Or how, only last year, Israel unilaterally froze all building in Judea, Samaria and even Jerusalem as a “confidence building measure,” even though by all agreements it had no obligation to do so, yet the Palestinians refused to even sit down at the table with Israel until a few days before the freeze was set to expire and then only on condition that it would be extended indefinitely.
Allow me to give you some information the Grey Lady managed to leave out of its sorry excuse for reporting. I do this because, the Times has no problem posting smiling pictures of terrorists and referring to them as sampling being held in Israeli jails.
The family killed, were Rabbi Udi Fogel, his wife Ruth, who taught at my daughter’s school, Yoav aged 11, Elad aged 4 and Hadas, 3 months old. They are survived by three other children.