'FIRING ROCKETS AT SCHOOL BUSES IS OBVIOUSLY OK'

The Arab street celebrates and the international community remains silent when a Jewish family of five – including three little children - gets butchered by Palestinians and when an Israeli school bus gets hit by a rocket fired from Gaza. But when Israel retaliates, the international community is quick to condemn the Jewish state.

QUE SERA SERA
By Rachel Raskin-Zrihen

politicalmavens.com
April 14, 2011

I was a little surprised to see the Associated Press story this week actually lead with the fact that a missile fired from Gaza hit an Israeli school bus instead of with the results of Israel’s inevitable response.

However, at least in our local paper, the bias remained true to form, noting that one of the retaliatory strike’s casualties, besides three terrorists, was a 50-year-old Palestinian civilian sitting outside his home.

Of course, this person was not a target, unlike the school bus, but that never seems to matter in the reporting from Israel, so why should this incident be any different?

On the school bus hit by the missile fired by Gazan terrorists into a civilian population center, we learn only that “two Israelis were injured, one critically.”

It’s very much like the massacre a few weeks ago of a Jewish family, including a toddler, an infant and a young child, which were, in print, reduced to “settlers.”

In this case also, the innocent Israelis were not, as is frustratingly and frighteningly typical, afforded the humanizing details in print as the Palestinian casualty was.

We don’t learn for instance, unless we do our own research, that the badly wounded person is a young teenage student who was riding home from school in his school bus.

This unprovoked terrorist attack on unarmed civilians, which is what this was no matter what spin to the contrary the media tries to put on it, prompted retaliatory strikes against known terrorist pockets, which resulted in the unfortunate deaths of some civilians – otherwise known in every war ever waged – as collateral damage.
Israelis generally feel badly about that when it happens and nearly always apologize.

This doesn’t bring the dead person back, of course, but beats the hell out of the dancing in the streets and the handing out of candies, which is the preferred reaction of many Palestinians to “Heroic Operations” like the massacre of the sleeping Fogel family.

Interestingly, and also familiar, the Palestinians announced a cease fire almost immediately after the missile attack. They do that a lot. Like a cowardly playground bully, sucker-punching someone and then running for the safety of a teacher before the victim can respond.

But these Gazans appear to have a death wish, since they have launched a constant barrage of rockets into Southern Israel, despite knowing from experience that even the Jews have limits. If they think that world condemnation, like that seen the last time the Israelis went in to stop that kind of problem, will prevent them from doing it again, they have another think coming.

Still, A.P reported that “several thousand Egyptians have marched to the Israeli Embassy in Cairo, protesting Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip.”

The story notes that some “2,000 protesters broke away from a mass demonstration…which was demanding ousted president Hosni Mubarak and his family” be tried for alleged corruption – to march on the embassy. This, evidently had to do with the strike made in retaliation for school bus attack.

Firing rockets at school buses is obviously OK in Egypt and elsewhere, since no protests were held anywhere on the planet in response.

And it doesn’t help that a once-respected Jewish jurist was duped into doing the dirty work of his enemies at the United Nations and presented the world with another piece of ammunition against the Jews. Even though Richard Goldstone, whose report is now widely cited to accuse Israel of war crimes in Gaza, has recanted those parts of it, the damage is done.

No matter.

After thousands of years as the world’s most convenient scapegoat the Jews mostly don’t even flinch when blamed for stuff – for the plague, for wars, for defending themselves, for living and breathing – so if Hamas is operating under the delusion that the Jews will allow themselves to be the victims of unremitting violence at their hands forever, they are sadly mistaken.

And if the world condemns Israel for defending itself against the murderous barbarians on their borders, c’est la vie, que sera, sera, and any other French phrase or Doris Day song that might be appropriate.