Jerusalem Temple Attack Shows Sickness at the Heart of Islam
IBDEditorials.com
Terror: Two Palestinians with axes massacred four rabbis Tuesday as they prayed at a Jerusalem synagogue, and fellow Palestinians threw candy and danced with glee. Don't tell us that it has nothing to do with Islam.
Violating the sacred space of one of the world's founding religions, the two cousins used guns, meat cleavers and axes in a barbaric rampage that left a floor full of bloody torahs, religious clothing, and dead bodies. The victims included a prominent and beloved rabbi along with three others, all dual U.S. or British Israeli citizens. A policeman was also murdered, and eight others were wounded.
"This is roughly comparable to terrorists invading a cathedral and killing a Cardinal among other clergy," wrote David P. Goldman, known as Spengler, on his Facebook page in a note to Christian friends. "Of course, we do not have a hierarchy in the Catholic sense, but Rabbi Moshe Twersky H'yd, a grandson of Rav Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, was one of our sages. Our grief and outrage are past description."
It was clearly the sort of attack that shocks the conscience, comparable to the 1170 murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral or maybe the 1980 killing of El Salvador Archbishop Oscar Romero.
The response from the White House, however, was pure boilerplate, attributing the savagery to "tensions" between Israelis and Palestinians and equating it to every act of force instead of acknowledging it for the new low in terrorism it really was.
"I strongly condemn today's terrorist attack at a synagogue in Jerusalem, which killed four innocent people, including U.S. citizens Aryeh Kupinsky, Cary William Levine and Mosheh Twersky, and injured several more," President Obama said in a statement.
"At this sensitive moment in Jerusalem, it is all the more important for Israeli and Palestinian leaders and ordinary citizens to work cooperatively together to lower tensions, reject violence, and seek a path forward towards peace."
It was almost as if he was blaming the bloodied in the temple, peacefully worshipping their God, for the lack of any civilized activity by the terrorists.
What's more, it comes on the heels of the White House's refusal to admit that any terrorist attacks in this day and age have a common denominator in radical Islam.
An American Muslim convert, Abdul-Rahman Kassig, was beheaded in Syria last weekend, and Obama insisted the barbaric act had nothing to do with Islam.
"ISIL's actions represented no faith, least of all the Muslim faith, which Abdul-Rahman adopted as his own," the White House statement read.
It's a failure to recognize the blood on the ground in Jerusalem, spilled by extremists murdering in a religion's name. The place attacked, after all, was a synagogue, a religious institution. Its attackers bellowed "Allahu Akbar" during their unprovoked attack.
After Israeli cops shot the attackers dead, Palestinians erupted in celebration, dancing in the streets and flinging candy among themselves, smiling, laughing and singing — proud of their "martyrs," who, in their minds, had made it to heaven.
If that has nothing to do with religion, what does?
The viciousness of the attack leaves no people of faith safe and calls for renewed thinking about a harder response to stop this barbarism. It will only succeed once the Islamic nature of the problem is confronted.