Islam: A Culture of Death & Hypocrisy?

The Muslims seem to have a blind spot when it comes to terrorism; they can't see when their people commit it, but have 20/20 vision when Muslims are the victims.

Let me just go on the record as saying that Eden Natan Zada is a terrorist & murderer, of the same ilk as any Muslim homicide bomber. His actions were wrong and the outlawed extremist Kach movement, of which he was a member, should be prosecuted and hammered as hard as Hezbollah.

That being said, there is a mighty difference in the way the Israelis react to terrorism committed by their citizens and how the Islamic world reacts to the daily acts of violence committed by Muslims.

Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe has written an excellent article which lays out the difference clearly.

Israel and its supporters complain with reason that Arab terrorism against Jews is too often shrugged off or excused by Arab and Muslim leaders, or that a murderous attack will be condemned in English for international consumption, while the government-run local media extols the killers in Arabic. But when the terrorists themselves are Jews -- admittedly a rare event -- do Israel's defenders live up to the standard they expect of others? How many of the statements quoted above, for example, would leading Israelis have been willing to make?

All of them.

It was Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who described Zada as a ''bloodthirsty Jewish terrorist" and Shimon Peres, the vice prime minister, who referred to the attack as ''the murder of innocent people." The cleric who pronounced Zada's ''despicable act . . . impossible to forgive" was Rabbi Shlomo Amar, the Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel.

Equally harsh was the judgment of the Yesha Council, the organization of Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. Though passionately opposed to the Gaza evacuation, it denounced Zada as ''a terrorist, a lunatic, and immoral." Especially noteworthy were the words of Rabbi Menachem Froman of the West Bank settlement of Tekoa, who spoke at the funeral of two of the victims. ''We the Jewish people in the land of Israel share in the pain and suffering" of the mourners, he declared. ''All people who believe in God . . . express their outrage at such an act."

Indeed, so horrified were Israelis by Zada's bloody crime that, as the newspaper Ha'aretz reported on Sunday, ''No cemetery will accept Jewish terrorist's body." (Zada was lynched by Shfaram residents in the wake of his attack.) The defense minister banned an interment in any military cemetery, saying Zada was ''not worthy of being buried next to fallen soldiers." Neither his hometown of Rishon Letzion nor Tapuah, the settlement to which he had recently moved, wanted his grave to be within their borders.

There's a very clear difference of culture when Jews won't even accept the body of one of their own for burial when he has committed the horrendous crimes of murder and terrorism, but Muslims parade the coffins of terrorists through their streets proclaiming them "heros" and "martyrs" and chanting praises to Allah for the murderer's bravery.