That little foot continues to haunt me, especially when I think of the Swedish PM Stefan Lofven’s face, the man who just declared attacks against Israeli civilians aren’t exactly “terrorism”.
Yotam Shmuel is an 18-month-old Israeli toddler. He was attacked by an Arab terrorist who rammed his car into the people at a bus stop at the Bridge of Chords in Jerusalem, where Yotam was waiting with his mother, Yael. The doctors failed to save his foot. He will never walk on his own two feet again.
His foot haunts me. The world doesn’t want to see or hear Yotam’s story. The same world that isn’t even aware that Adele Biton died two years after a terrorist hurled stones against that four-year-old Israeli girl that hit her head, killed by “Palestinian militants”, as the international community calls barbaric Arab terrorists. Adele didn’t "pass away", she was murdered in a terror attack condoned by the “civil world”.
The world doesn’t want to see or hear Yotam’s story.
270 Israelis have been wounded so far in this new wave of terrorism wrongly called “Third Intifada." It is not an uprising, but a genocidal campaign. There are Israelis so traumatized that they now go out in a bullet proof vest. It is a very heavy price for a small society.
During the “Oslo War” that began in 2001, we lived through a black hole that swallowed up 1,557 people and left 17,000 injured. If a proportional number of the population equivalent to those 1,557 victims were murdered in the United States, there would be 53,756 Americans killed. Israeli figures of those wounded in terror attacks, extrapolated to the population of the United States, would be the equivalent of close to 664,133 injured.
Now you have a better idea why Yotam’s foot haunts me. Because this is a war against the hearts, souls, and bodies of the Jewish nation. Terrorism, financed by the international community, wants to turn Israel into a disabled society. Nearly 4 in 10 Israelis have survived attacks, lost family members, or had family or friends wounded.
We are talking about Jews scathed and scarred, who require years of costly and complicated physical and mental rehabilitation. Israeli doctors estimate that 40 percent of the Israeli injured will have permanent disabilities.
After the bomb went off everything was quiet; you could only hear the voices of the wounded. The world, which condemns Israel to disappear, should be haunted by Yotam’s cries.