The Marvellous Professor MacEoin

He's the British academic about whom I blogged the other day: http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/04/british-academics-splendid-refutation.html
What a marvellous man he is, a beacon in dark times.

Here's part of an open letter he addressed to the orphaned 12-year-old Tamar Fogel, whose parents and siblings were slaughtered by Arab terrorists at Itamar.

"We have never met, nor are we likely to. I am not a Jew nor an Israeli, though for many years I have defended both Jews and Israelis from the physical and political attacks that are made on them....

The most important for you is to be sure that the only guilty parties were the terrorists who carried out the slaughter. And I need not tell you that these were not the first Palestinian terrorists to take out their hate, their resentment, and their jealousy on helpless Jews living on Jewish land.

.... After the Shoah, many rabbis tackled the question of hester panim, asking why HaShem had seemed to turn his face away from his people. I am not a Jew, and I cannot provide easy answers to those questions. You must seek your own answers from your rabbis and in your scriptures. One answer may be found in a short sound recording that was made in Belsen shortly after its liberation by British forces. It was made by the BBC and contains at the end description of a Shabbat service held by a British rabbi, at the end of which the survivors stand and sing HaTikva. They are weak, they are out of tune, some of them will still die: but they are singing in open defiance of the very great Nazi evil that had overwhelmed them and their families. Three years after that, the state of Israel was established.

I'm writing, first because I'm a writer and that's how I express my feelings best. But also because I want to convey just how many people's thoughts are with you. You have your grandparents and aunts or uncles, and after that you have your small and concerned community of I'tamar, but beyond that you have a world of people, Jews and non-Jews, who stand with you in your grief. We feel helpless, not knowing what we can or should do to help, yet longing to do so. How many people can say they truly love the murderers who came to your house that night? Some may hand out candies and dance in the streets, but how meaningful is that? They love themselves and their own dreams of glory, but who can truly love men of blood, people who kill infants in their cradles?....

You are in my thoughts and in the thoughts of millions of other people because the murder of your family has gone so deeply into so many people's hearts. The list of atrocities carried out on Jews, not just in Israel but beyond, is very long. As a result, it's easy to let them all blur together into one mass. But every so often one death or a group of deaths stands out and demands special attention. One day there will be a memorial to the sacrifice your family made. People from far away may come to visit it. Photographs of it will appear in the press. But the true memorial will be you, an ordinary girl, with a torn heart and a wounded soul, going to school, going to shul, making friends, baking bread, sewing, cooking, reading, blushing when a certain young man comes to speak to you, going to Kever Yosef to marry him, giving birth to your first child. I just mean to say that no-one expects from you heroic deeds, no-one wants you to have to shoulder resistance to all the evils you know better than most. It is your ordinary deeds, the day-to-day living of an ordinary life that are for the creators of horror the most painful thing of all, that Jews will continue to live on land sanctified by Jewish blood. At the end of that recording made in Belsen, someone calls out 'Am Yisrael Chai'. By living, the killers only bring eternal disgrace on themselves, their families, and everyone who shelters them. By living, you make clear to everyone that the People of Israel live, that their light will not be snuffed out, and that when your enemies have gone to dust and seen a darkness beyond measure engulf them, the light of the Jews will illuminate the nations. Grow and be happy and tell us what you see on your journey."

Read the rest: http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2011/04/open-letter-to-tamar-fogel.html
Hat tip: reader Shirlee

Melanie on her "Felony": Melanie Phillips interviewed regarding Arab Barbarism and Media Bias against Israel (video)

In a recent post (http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/03/stinker-out-of-bedfordshire.html) I told how an article on The Spectator website by the British columnist Melanie Phillips, in which she referred to the barbarism of the Arabs who perpetrated the Itamar massacre, has been referred to British police.  In this interview with Yaakov Achi-Meir on Israeli TV's Channel One Ms Phillips defends her choice of phrase, and explains how the British media are "world leaders" in the "moral inversion" which leads it to ignore atrocities against Israel and only the military responses to Israel, thus contributing materially to the public's impression of Israel as the aggressor.  Ms Phillips pulls no punches in condemning Arab attitudes and in telling how Israel should be dealing with its public relations problem.

Hat tip for the original video http://www.iba.org.il/olam to Avraham Reiss of Jerusalem

"This and Everything That Happens to the Jewish Nation Won't Break Us": Interview with the orphaned Tamar Fogel (video)

A Stinker Out of Bedfordshire

The renowned British columnist Melanie Phillips recently wrote a humdinger of a book entitled The World Turned Upside Down.  Just how upside down that portion of the world known as Great (make that "formerly Great") Britain, aka Cloud Cuckoo Land, is has been freshly demonstrated by the fact that The Spectator, on whose site Ms Phillips's blog appears, is being investigated by, of all absurdities, the constabulary of Bedfordshire. 

Why?  Because someone living in that county has apparently referred to that force this post http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/6779100/armchair-barbarism.thtml on which Ms Phillips wrote of the "barbarism" of the Arabs who killed the Fogel family in Itamar.

I'd call butchering a family while it slept, and in the process decapitating a tiny baby, barbarism. Wouldn't you?

And now it's up to the Bedfordshire plods to decide whether to prosecute.

It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world.

Read more:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/6796298/the-threat-to-a-british-liberty.thtml

The Kindness of Strangers

Here's 19-year-old Corporal Haim Levin,  an IDF paramedic, holding a newborn baby girl, Jude.  She's come into the world at the very locality where relatives of the Fogel Family are mourning the murder victims. 

With news of the Fogels' massacre, fireworks and other signs of celebration were apparent from Palestinian villages nearby.

The birth of Jude has brought joy in the midst of grief, life amid death.

Without the help of the medical team of which Corporal Levin is part, Jude would have died, for the umbilical cord was strangling her.  Her mother was rushed to the locality in a van, and Corporal Levin was the first of the team to reach the distressed pair.

He recalls:

"I moved closer and saw the baby's head and upper body.  The umbilical cord was around the baby's neck; the baby was grey and didn't move.

I first removed the cord from the neck and at the same time asked paramedics to prepare the baby resuscitation kit. I pinched her to see if she's responding, and she started to cry."

Jude is a Palestinian baby, and her mother had been taken to the settlement because of its medical facilities, which has much experience in treating Palestinians. 

Jubilant at her birth, Palestinians from the nearby village of Nabi Salah gathered around the medical team.

Said Corporal Levin:

"They thanked us and told us they named the girl Jude.  I volunteered for Magen David Adom since age 15 and it's the first time I witnessed childbirth. It was an amazing feeling, to hold the girl that was just born in my arms, and to know that in this complex place we did something good."

Noted ambulance driver Orli Shlomo:

"It was touching, but I couldn't help but think that a few meters from there, people were sitting Shiva for another baby, who was murdered.  I was touched to see the face of the new baby, but I also thought about the face of the murdered baby."

Read more: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4043536,00.html

Biased, Brazen, and Contemptible

Here's the BBC's online report of the massacre of the Fogel Family:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12721170

Here's a related snide report, by Jon Donnison, a Jeremy-Bowen-in-the-making, from what I've seen of him:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12725487

Here's the BBC's arrogant, dismissive response to complaints regarding the coverage – or rather lack of it – of the massacre of a  family – correction – a "settler" family:

http://honestreporting.com/baby-killers-update-bbc-responds-to-hr-criticism/

Been there before, of course, and now that Lord Patten, who has a proven track record of pro-Palestinian bias, has been shoe-horned into the position of Chairman of the BBC Trust (see http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/03/lord-patten-as-chairman-of-bbc-trust.html), we will doubtless be there again.  To no avail.

http://honestreporting.com/bbc-bias-an-in-depth-analysis-2/

Biased, Brazen, and Contemptible.

Those are among the more polite and printable words for the national broadcaster, whose disregard for its Charter and Producers' Guidelines, disdain for licence-payers, pimping of its own pet leftist agendas, and demonisation of Israel,  is now completely out of control.

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

On the Murders of Babies – and Double Standards

Many people have noticed the underwhelming media reaction to the cold-blooded murders of the Fogel Family.  The BBC, for example, in a less than robust, and in some respects propagandistic report,  tagged Al Beeb's usual mantra about "settlements" onto the end:

"US-brokered peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians stalled last year over the issue of Israeli settlement building.

Palestinians have refused all direct contact with Israel until construction is frozen.

Nearly half a million Jews live in more than 100 settlements built since Israel's 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

They are held to be illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this."

(Can't Al Beeb let go of the demonisation politics for one second?!)

In choosing the wording that the lives of two children of the family had been "spared" the report implied that the terrorists (of course, Al Beeb didn't use the T-word) had shown those two mercy when in fact the sole reason the children had escaped butchery was due to their own extraordinary luck in evading the terrorists.

One of the most incisive analyses of media reaction to the murders of the Fogel Family in much of the mainstream media comes from the always interesting Professor Phyllis Chesler.
'
She points out, inter alia:

‘From the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000, they have killed at least 123 Israeli children http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/03/13/sleeping-in-samaria-on-shabbat/—on purpose, not accidentally. They have shot up teenagers while studying, have tried to kill children in nursery schools and child care centers. Palestinian terrorists have even killed children at Itamar. In 2002, Habash Hanani did so, and he is currently being glorified by the Palestinian Authority.

Palestinian terrorists are Baby Killers and yet Arab, Islamist, and liberal fascist propaganda have managed to convince the world that Israelis and Jews are Baby Killers—Israel, a country whose military never uses civilians as hostages and which, contrary to Big Lie myth, is exquisitely restrained when it comes to avoiding civilian casualties during urban battle.

Arab and Muslim terrorists are Baby Killers. They kill their own in order to kill the babies of their enemies. The Taliban in Pakistan specialize in grooming 5-10 year old orphan boys to blow themselves up. Muslims, Arabs, Islamist terrorists in general, and Palestinians and Iranians in particular, brainwash, exploit, mere children and teenagers as jihadists and as suicide killers.

Today, sickeningly, the western mainstream media, and some Jewish and Israeli anti-Zionists as well, are implicitly, essentially, blaming the settlers for their own murders! They are “settlers,” “radical settlers,” “living beyond the green line,” not human beings, not Jews, not Israelis, not even real victims. Real victims should not have been living there, their geographical presence comprises an (understandable) “provocation.” Similarly, women’s uncovered faces, infidel women especially, constitute a “provocation” too so that they have only themselves to blame when Allah-fearing Muslim men rape, gang-rape, and assault them.

Real victims are the Palestinian terrorists who are forced to murder babies in response to being “illegally,” and immorally Occupied.

....

Demonize settlers, isolate Israelis, insist that “Islamophobia,” not Islamic terrorism, is the problem, (do so in the American Congress), refuse to stop the wholesale slaughter of Muslims by Muslims (think Libya, think Darfur), instead, blame Israel because the Palestinians do not want a Palestinian state, lean on Israel to negotiate harder, give up even more, give up every city, including Jerusalem and then simply wait for the law-of-returning Palestinians to overcome the last “settlement” standing: Tel Aviv—do so, even as the entire Arab Muslim Middle East is exploding over non-Israel specific problems--and inevitably, the Palestinian fiends will be emboldened to act and will slaughter an innocent, peaceful Jewish family in their beds and of course, on the Jewish Sabbath.’

Read Phyllis Chesler's entire piece here: http://www.newsrealblog.com/2011/03/13/natural-disasters-palestinian-barbarism/
And see also Melanie Phillips's characteristically wise and wonderful piece: http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/6779100/armchair-barbarism.thtml

Candy for the Carnage

Above are five members of the Israeli Fogel Family, a mother and father in their thirties, and three young children – the youngest a baby aged three months old.  They were, of course, the family murdered the other night in their own home by Palestinian terrorists – all but the mother, who was leaving the bathroom when confronted by the men responsible and evidently fought for her life – were killed in their beds.  The three year old boy had been stabbed through the heart.  His father and siblings – the eleven-year-old boy and the tiny baby girl – had had their throats cut.

Below are scenes from Hamas-controlled Gaza, where news of the atrocity was greeted with rejoicing.  The young man in the pictures below is expressing his approval of the cold-blooded massacre by handing out sweets, or, as Americans would say, candy.

In Rafah two Hamas policemen accept the proferred sweets:

A motorist does likewise:

And so does an elderly woman:

Hamas has reportedly also foreshadowed kidnapping and killing Israelis and ransoming their bodies back to their families. (http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2011/03/hamas-plans-to-abduct-and-murder.html)

Look again at the photos of the Fogel Family.  Their smiles, and their hope for the future symbolised by the children whom Mr and Mrs Fogel brought into this world, celebrate life.

In contrast, Hamas is a dark Islamic force that celebrates death – and such is its depravity that it celebrates even the cold-blooded slaughter of babies.

Yet I guess the usual suspects in the Western world are still "All Hamas Now".

But imagine the furore – the publicity in the leftwing press and on the BBC News website – if Israeli settlers had treated a Palestinian family the way brutes in human form have treated the Fogels. 

See also http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/142846