Looking for Jews to kill
Amir Daraj and Yusuf Anqawi went looking for Jews to kill the other day.
Stephen M. Flatow
That’s how a lot of Palestinian Arabs choose to spend their time, it seems. Twenty-year-olds in other countries pass their leisure time at sporting events, movies, cafes. But in Palestinian Arab society, they do things a little differently.
Daraj and Anqawi were residents of Arab towns near Ramallah. That’s Ramallah, as in the capital of the Palestinian Authority. Daraj and Anqawi weren’t living under “Israeli occupation.” Ramallah and its environs have been under P.A. rule since 1995. Daraj and Anqawi were born in 1999. They literally spent their entire life under Palestinian self-rule.
Despite the constant refrain from the J Street and the international news media about the so-called “Israeli occupation of the Palestinians,” the reality is that 98% of the Palestinian Arabs live under Palestinian rule. Therefore, there are no settlers or soldiers in the towns where Daraj and Anqawi live. When they decided they wanted to murder some Jews, they had to leave their villages and drive some distance.
Together with a third friend (whose name has not yet been released), they drove to an area where Israeli soldiers sometimes patrol for terrorists. No doubt the trio couldn’t believe their eyes when they spotted an Israeli vehicle that had broken down and several soldiers trying to help its occupants.
Normal people who see a car broken down by the side of the road will stop to lend a helping hand—or at least call 911. But not if the people who broke down are Jews and the passersby are Palestinian Arabs on a Jew-hunt.
Daraj, Anqawi and their friend probably couldn’t believe their luck. Unsuspecting Jews, sitting ducks, easy targets. And Daraj had the perfect weapon at his command—his car. He turned the steering wheel sharply and drove straight into the Jews, seriously injuring two of them.
But this isn’t 1939. It’s 2019—these Jews fight back. The soldiers fired at the attackers, killing Daraj and Anqawi, and wounding their friend. In the terrorists’ car, the Israelis found several unexploded firebombs. The captured terrorist confessed that before the car-ramming attack, he and his buddies had driven over to the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv road known as Route 443 and tried to set some Jews on fire there.
That’s what happens when a firebomb, also called a Molotov cocktail, strikes an automobile. It engulfs the vehicle, the driver and the passengers in a hellish inferno. That was the terrorists’ intention.
Despite the discovery of the firebombs and the terrorist’s admission, the mayor of a nearby P.A. village immediately told reporters that they were not terrorists at all. Mayor Khaldoun Al Seek, of the village of Kafr Ni’ma, announced that the collision was “a road accident, not a ramming attack.” The P.A. Foreign Ministry issued a statement accusing Israel of carrying out “a brutal execution” of two innocent Palestinians.
You may think the mayor and his comrades at the P.A. Foreign Ministry are lunatics or psychopathic liars. They are neither. They are just cynical propagandists who leap to the defence of Palestinian Arab terrorists because they genuinely regard terrorists as heroes and consider all Jews to be evil creatures who deserve to be run over or set on fire.
No matter how clear-cut the evidence that an attack was perpetrated by terrorists, of course, major Western news media agencies always look for ways to minimize Palestinian culpability.
The Washington Post allotted the story just one paragraph, with the headline “Car Strikes Israeli Troops; Two Palestinians Killed”—as if it might have been an automobile accident. The Guardian (of London) emphasized that “the frequency of such attacks” has decreased recently, and “many were carried out by individuals rather than members of militant groups.” See, so it’s not so awful! And besides, they’re not terrorists, just “militants.”
Last but not least, the Associated Press weighed in with its usual dose of immoral equivalency. “Since 2015, Palestinians have killed over 50 Israelis in stabbings, shootings and car-ramming attacks, and Israeli forces have killed more than 260 Palestinians in that same period,” the AP reported.
Get it? Israelis shooting in self-defence are no different from Palestinian terrorist aggressors. Victims are the same as persecutors. Cops are the same as robbers. Of course, in such an equation, whichever side has more casualties is the one we’re supposed to feel sorry for. That’s right: body-count morality. Tragic!
Stephen M. Flatow, an attorney in New Jersey, is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. His book, “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror,” has just been published.
It was precisely on the body count morality that the USA lost the Viet Nam war.
1 – They lost their grip on the fact that casualty numbers are not necessarily related to the military or political results of an action. The VN population was in situ – still is – and no more willing to give in than the Americans in their War of Independence. THe Germans had to give in when overrun because in an industrial society as opposed to a rural society, the occupying troops could stop the economy.
2 – The US lost their moral and morale security in the process of the drip drip of US casualties without visible results for it.
3 – The effect of casualty rates on a society depends on that society and not on the society and its forces inflicting the casualties. This is why the Arab skirmish war carries on given the real numbers of casualties are a bloody nuisance but stilll half the rateof road and other accident deaths so insignificant in terms of economics and demographics. In fact they have partly encouraged young Israeli couples to have three children… “in case something happens to one of them.” Conversely the Arabs ignore their casualties for believing they have gone to paradise. Now if Israel really did impose a blockade on Gaza like the Araab blockade of Israeli in 1947 – 67 the distress for want of food and medicine would make a difference that might lead to a sign off.
Than you Stephen for your article which is as clear as it can be. One day the deniers on both sides will finally understand the difference between motivation to commit a murder of innocent people and defending a life.
The scenario you refer to is certainly an eye opener to many who still don’t get it.
Kol HaKavod
Dalia Ayalon Sinclair