Children of the Martyr Race

Harrowing photographs of the Fogel Family following their cold-blooded slaughter – reportedly at the hands of members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, a wing of the supposedly moderate Fatah, Israel’s “partner for peace” – were made available by the victims’ relatives and have been widely reproduced.

I chose not to use these photographs, believing that to do so was disrespectful to the victims, preferring to show the family members as they were in life – and unwilling to give satisfaction to any sick individuals who might gloat at the sight of dead Jews.

In common with many other bloggers, David Hallam, a philosemitic Methodist preacher in the UK, has reproduced two of the pictures on his website, in a post calling for his church – which is nowadays in the forefront of the BDS movement – to condemn their killings. One shows the three-year-old boy, Elad, stabbed through the heart, lying on the floor in a pool of blood; the other shows his eleven-year-old brother, Yoav, who had been reading in bed when the demons struck and slashed his throat, slumped diagonally across the blood-stained sheets, one of his bare feet on the blood-soaked carpet. http://methodistpreacher.blogspot.com/2011/03/church-must-condemn-itamar-killings.html

Richard Hall, another Methodist minister – one who is continuously critical of Israel and who certainly supports the Boycott – soon posted a thinly veiled response on his own blog:

“Their [the Fogels’] murders are being put to most cynical use. Photographs of the Fogels’ bloody bodies lying where they died have been released to the internet, provoking outrage and revulsion, as any such act should. Unfortunately, much of the reaction has gone beyond revulsion at the killings and has become an outpouring of hatred not merely towards the individuals who carried out this dreadful crime but also towards the community from which they are presumed to have come. Israeli Minister of Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Yuli Edelstein said on Sunday, “Only these ghastly images can show the world what and who the State of Israel has to deal with,” and many bloggers have been even more strident. This message is reprehensible and dishonouring to the Fogels, feeding as it does the racist lie of uniquely Arab savagery.

Sadly, the bitter truth is that these deaths do not change anything. If the settlements were illegal before , they remain so now. And while this killing is shocking, it is not unique. It stands as one more link in a chain of violence and injustice which has been forged in this conflict for generations.”  Read more: http://theconnexion.net/wp/#ixzz1Ghaqcp8B

A like-minded colleague of Hall was soon fulminating about “Hallam’s despicable use of them [the pictures]” and before long that well-known defamer of Israel, young Ben White (you can read about him here http://cifwatch.com/2010/07/02/ben-whites-latest-anti-israel-analysis/ and here http://richardmillett.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/there-is-no-such-thing-as-anti-semitism/ ) was putting the boot into the Jewish State – cynically using the murders to make squalid political points, in fact.

To the blogger himself I commented:

‘I think the best response from you to the cold-bloodied murder of the Fogel Family would be silence, Richard, in view of the fact that you have cynically used their butchery to inveigh against Israel yet again.

That the settlements are illegal is, in fact, a matter of dispute.

But what should not be in dispute is the fact that babies and children of “settler” parents cannot be held accountable for the “illegal” choice of their parents.

There have been 123 deliberate murders of Israeli children by Palestinian terrorists since the First Intifada commenced in 2000.

By contrast, Israelis do not kill children in cold blood, nor do they rejoice when children are murdered.

Please do not demonise the mourners and the bereaved; it ill becomes a Christian minister.’

Commented an indignant Israeli from Jerusalem:

‘The photographs were published after great public discussion, which I have been following for 2 days on Israel radio; they were published with the consent of the nearest relatives of the massacred family.

They were published exactly because of people like you: people who can still write “This message is reprehensible and dishonouring to the Fogels, feeding as it does the racist lie of uniquely Arab savagery”, and can find it in their hearts and minds to turn the event into yet another attack on Israel, meaning JEWS.’

Another outraged commenter noted:

“The pictures were released at the express wish of the children’s grandparents. For years Israel has refrained from using such emotive and distressing pictures, such as the 12 month old baby killed by a sniper, the two children murdered in their beds as their mother read them a story, or the two boys bludgeoned to death when they were out on a hike.

Did I hear any objection from you when the notorious man in a green helmet carried round the same allegedly-killed Palestinian children to different sites where they could be photographed and then went around strategically placing toys among rubble to set a false picture [?].”

And another pointed out:

“... it is chuffing rich of your to suddenly develop a sense of propriety over the use of images of dead children when these are de rigeur on anti-Israel rallies/riots - sometimes even the same child used on multiple occasions.”

The above is an excellent point.

Here, for example, is the singer-cum-activist Annie Lennox at an anti-Israel rally in London, showing child casualties of Operation Cast Lead, for which, although obviously tragic and regrettable, there is of course no moral equivalence with cold-bloodied acts of terror:

And here, courtesy of Richard Millett’s trusty camera, is “Michael,” a bloke who regularly pickets the Ahava shop in London, always carrying this photo montage, apparently:

This list of atrocities by Palestinian terrorists before the Six Day War, some of them involving the deaths of children, gives the lie to the oft-heard claim of Israel’s detractors that Palestinian terrorism came in response to “Occupation”:

http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Terrorism-+Obstacle+to+Peace/Palestinian+terror+before+2000/Which+Came+First-+Terrorism+or+Occupation+-+Major.htm


It was with the Ma’alot massacre of 1974 – in which 22 children were killed and 68 injured – that the deliberate murders of Jewish children by Palestinian terrorists reached its nadir.

And as Daled Amos (from whose blog I've copied these two composite photos, directly above and below, of child victims) explains in detail, since the start of the First Intifada 123 Israeli children have lost their lives at the hands of terrorists. http://daledamos.blogspot.com/2006/08/123-israeli-children-killed-by.html

Things really have got to a shameful state when posting photographs of dead Israeli children provokes more condemnation than do the monstrous acts of evil men that caused those children to lose their lives.

Update: Another must-read from the great Melanie Phillips: http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/6786364/a-terrible-resonance.thtml