Shoah in Jerusalem

The massacre of the five members of the Fogel family in Israel -- including three small children -- has gotten some attention, but not enough.   It seems as if terrorism against Israelis by Palestinians has become so commonplace that we almost don't notice anymore.   But an interview in National Review today with the Italian journalist, Giulio Meotti, calls this spade a spade:  he calls it a "new Shoah," or slow-motion genocide, and directly equates the ideology of the Arab anti-semites with Nazism.   It's an extraordinarily powerful interview, and this passage in particular should bring tears to anyone who has eyes to cry with:

Rabbi Mordechai Elon once referred to one area of the Mount Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem as the burial area for the nation’s unborn victims (as opposed to the section for the nation’s great leaders). Eyal and Yael Shorek are buried there; Yael was nine months pregnant when she was killed. Next to them lie Gadi and Tzippi Shemesh, who were killed in downtown Jerusalem immediately after having a scan of their unborn twins. Four members of the Gavish family are buried next to one another in Elon Moreh, a settlement in the biblical West Bank. In Gaza, a terrorist squad opened fire on the car of Jewish settler Tali Hatuel, who died on the spot. Then her four daughters were murdered, each with a shot to the head at point-blank range. It was an execution. The attacks on the Park Hotel in Netanya and in the Beit Yisrael neighborhood in Jerusalem wiped out entire families. Ruti Peled and her granddaughter Sinai Keinan were murdered in Petah Tikva. Noa Alon and her granddaughter Gal Eizenman were killed at the French Hill intersection in Jerusalem. Five members of the Schijveschuurder family were killed in the bombing of the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem. Boaz Shabo lost his wife, Rachel, and their three children in a terrorist attack in Itamar, and he feels as if this is “a mini-holocaust.”

We of the West must support the threatened democracy of Israel and its beleaguered people, so many of whom descend from the survivors of the Nazi death camps and the charnel house of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.   If we do not do so, if we side with those who would choose the expedient path of least resistance and appease the Arab fascists, or those who, in perversions of their own liberalism, choose to see the Palestinians who terrorize the Jews of Israel as victims, then we truly will have lost our souls.

Meotti's book, A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel's Victims of Terrorism, might be a painful read, but it seems like a story that needs to be told, and remembered, lest we forget.