The Price of Restraint is Death
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
Yesterday afternoon a young woman
stood by the side of a road holding up a sign. It
read “Gush Etzion”. Those two words summon up
spittle-flecked rants about Zionist settlements from
the anti-Israel left.
But for Dalia, it was just home.
And then it wasn’t.
Dalia caught a ride to a bus stop on the way home
from her job as a children’s occupational therapist.
Her next stop was a shift at Yad Sarah, a volunteer
organization for the elderly and disabled.
But before that could happen, a Muslim attacker did
what songs, cartoons and posters distributed by the
Palestinian Authority and Hamas encouraging “Car
Jihad” had been telling him to do.
He ran her over with a Mazda van.
With the 26-year-old woman on the ground, the
courageous Islamic Jihadist stabbed her as she lay
dying. Then shouting Allahu Akbar, he began slashing
at an unarmed man who had stopped to help. When the
unarmed man fighting him off with his bare hands
proved too much for the knife-wielding Jihadist, the
killer fled, was wounded and taken into custody.
Dalia’s father, a volunteer with Magen David Adom,
Israel’s Red Cross, heard that there had been an
attack. He did what countless Israeli fathers and
mothers began doing right after they heard the news.
He called his daughter. There was no answer.
Despite being only in her twenties, Dalia knew what
was coming. This wasn’t her killer’s first act of
terrorism and it wasn’t her first time as a victim
of Islamic terrorism.
When she was seventeen years old, Dalia was attacked
by a knife-wielding terrorist in the same place. But
the terrorist didn’t have a van and there were armed
men at the scene.
“I stood on February 28, 2006 at Gush Etzion
Junction when a terrorist came and began to stab
those standing at a hitchhiking station,” she would
later write.
She described terrorists for whom prison life is
“like a hotel”, who watch television, take courses
and contact their lawyers. “Those who stab Jews have
their rights and privileges. The injustice cries out
to Heaven.”
“Punish and expel those who threaten us," Dalia
wrote, “no matter the cost to them. They must pay
the price for their terror. That is the only way the
terrorism will end.”
As you read this, Dalia Lemkus will have already
been buried. Her parents and her five brothers and
sisters will have cried over her grave. Her killer
will receive the best possible care in an Israeli
hospital. The Palestinian Authority will use the
foreign aid it receives from the United States and
the European Union to pay him a salary for life. If
he gets out, he will be entitled to everything from
special housing to free medical care paid for by
you, by me and by all of us.
Stabbing a young woman in the neck
while she lay in the street made him a hero of
Palestine. He has become a model of Muslim manhood,
little boys in UNRWA schools will be taught about
his great deed and encouraged to follow in his
footsteps. And they will, just as he had followed
the example of those great Muslim heroes who had
murdered Jewish women and children in Hebron before
he was born.
The educational system staffed by Hamas supporters
and paid for by foreign aid does its work well. Some
countries turn out future doctors and scientists.
The Palestinian Authority turns out heroes who can
nerve themselves up to take on a 26-year-old Jewish
woman as long as they have a few thousand pounds of
van or at least a butcher knife on their side. Not
to mention Allah and the Koran.
Dalia’s killer may remain behind bars where Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch will complain
that his smartphone isn’t fast enough, that his Coca
Cola isn’t fizzy enough and that the clothes he
shops for remotely with his family using the money
that the Palestinian Authority pays to the families
of its heroes don’t fit him correctly. But it’s also
possible that he will be set free.
He was before.
Dalia’s killer had been in jail for terrorism before
he was released. Releasing terrorists is how Israel
demonstrates its goodwill toward terrorists.
This year, Obama forced Israel to free over a
hundred convicted terrorists as a “gesture” just to
get the Palestinian Authority terrorists to discuss
continuing talks with Israel. Israel was being
pressured into releasing terrorists in exchange for
an opportunity to negotiate resuming negotiations.
And Israel freed most of the terrorists until the
PLO broke the deal and went to the UN.
Secretary of State John Kerry told the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee that it was Israel’s
fault because it “didn’t release the Palestinian
prisoners on the day they were supposed to be
freed.”
The next time that Obama and Kerry force Israel to
release terrorists for the opportunity to negotiate
the possibility of negotiating with terrorists,
Dalia’s killer may be shouting “Allahu Akbar” all
over again. And if Israel doesn’t release him on the
day that Obama and the PLO want him released, it
will be blamed for not wanting peace. What better
way is there to achieve peace than by freeing
terrorists?
Dalia left her comments on talkbacks in which
Israelis shout to be heard above the reassuring lies
told by their media. Now she has been silenced. She
will be buried in her native town of Tekoa where her
body will rest unless the left and their Islamic
partners succeed in forcing the expulsion of the
thousand Jews of Tekoa, the living in the houses and
the dead from the town cemetery.
The State Department, which
rejects the existence of the living and dead Jews of
Tekoa and wants them gone, responded to Dalia’s
murder by urging both sides to show restraint.
The AP’s Matt Lee asked State Department spokeswoman
Jen Psaki whether she meant that Israelis should
show restraint by standing still and allowing
themselves to be stabbed.
“If you’re standing at a bus stop or something and
someone runs a car into you or comes up and stabs
you, I don’t know how to, I mean, those people
aren’t, don’t need to exercise restraint, do they?”
Psaki laughed and refused to address the question.
But it’s a question that ought to be addressed.
Israel is constantly ordered to show restraint. It
is told that its response to Muslim terrorism is
disproportionate. But when does proportionate
restraint begin? Is it when a Muslim terrorist is
running you over with a van and sinking his knife
into your neck? Or is it only when the terrorist is
down and you contemplate doing something about the
men who sent him and will continue sending more like
him?
Israel is generously allowed to fight back once the
knife is at its neck. But once it breaks free, then
it’s told to show restraint. Taking out the
terrorist networks that send out men like this would
be disproportionate. Refusing to release the killer
of Dalia would show that Israel doesn’t want peace.
And no matter what Israel does, how much it
sacrifices, how many young women it buries in its
cemeteries after they have been run over, stabbed or
blown up, no matter how many of their killers it
releases, it is always guilty of not wanting peace
badly enough.
Critics of Israel like Jeffrey Goldberg insist that
its situation is not “sustainable”. And that’s true.
Struggling with an attacker who has a knife at your
throat is not sustainable. Either he cuts your
throat or you cut his throat. If every time you get
enough breathing room to fight back, you try to
negotiate with him, instead of doing to him what
he’s trying to do to you, then eventually he will
kill you.
Dalia survived her first attack.
She didn’t survive her second attack. There are only
so many second chances when someone wants to kill
you. And if you are a non-Muslim in the Muslim
world, then someone always wants to kill you.
The price of restraint is death. Negotiating with
your killers lets them trade up from a knife to a
van, from a stone to a rocket, from an outpost in
Lebanon to fortresses within range of your major
cities.
Dalia tried to warn Israelis. She tried to warn the
world. Now her voice speaks from the grave. It is
the voice of the dead. It is the voice of truth.
“They must pay the price for their terror. That is
the only way the terrorism will end.”