While the Obama administration angrily condemns Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for saying the Palestinians are seeking "ethnic cleansing," the Palestinians keep proving him right. Is anybody in Washington paying attention?
Thursday was just another day of Palestinian ethnic cleansing.
On the outskirts of Jerusalem, Palestinian attackers hurled potentially-lethal rocks and bottles of paint at a civilian bus. Why bottles of paint? The strategy is for the paint to splash across the front windshield, in the hope that the driver's line of vision will be obstructed, so that the bus will crash. And kill a lot of Jews. That's the goal: kill a lot of Jews.
Why bottles of paint? The strategy is for the paint to splash across the front windshield, in the hope that the driver's line of vision will be obstructed...
The use of bottles of paint also illustrates how much planning and deliberation went into this attack. It wasn't a case of kids playing by the side of the road and throwing some pebbles at a passing bus as a spontaneous prank. Paint normally is sold in cans, not bottles. Somebody had to buy cans of paint, empty out some bottles, procure a funnel, and then carefully pour the paint into the bottles. That gives the plotter a lot of time to think about what he's doing.
Now, for a person with any humanity or decency, all this preparation might provide time to pause and reflect--perhaps to have second thoughts and change his mind. But not this guy. He prepared those potentially-lethal bottles. He gathered together some like-minded assailants, they all agreed on their murderous plan, and then they set out to kill a lot of Jews. They knew they might end up in jail--or even dead, if somebody shot back at them. But their desire to kill Jews outweighed the risks.
That same day, out near Kiryat Arba, two other Palestinians had a similar idea, but with different weapons. A Palestinian man named Firas al-Birawi Khadour and a Palestinian woman named Raghad Khadour--presumably either relatives or a married couple--drove their car headfirst into a crowd of Jews standing at a bus stop.
The Khadours come from the village of Bani Na'im. They are not exactly victims of Israeli oppression; their town has been ruled by the Palestinian Authority, not by Israel, for the past twenty-one years. The people standing at the bus stop were not hurting anyone. They were waiting for a bus. But they were Jews. And the Khadours wanted to kill as many Jews as they could. They didn't have bombs or machine-guns; so they used their car.
Well, not only their car. Mr. Khadour was killed while carrying out his attack, but Ms. Khadour was only injured. Israeli medics tended to her wounds and then transported her to the Shaare Zedek hospital in Jerusalem, where she received free emergency medical care. When they carried her from the car--the one they had just used to ram all those civilians--they found a large knife on her seat. Evidently if she had not been injured, the plan was to jump out of the car and start stabbing Jews. Precisely that scenario has taken place on numerous previous occasions: the ramming-and-stabbing strategy.
Three Israeli teenagers who were injured in the attack were also taken to Shaare Zedek hospital. The New York Times won't follow up to report on their suffering. The Washington Post doesn't care how their lives are affected. CNN isn't interested in what happened to them. Three more near-misses in the Palestinian ethnic cleansing campaign. Not news!
But the day was not done yet. Another Palestinian terrorist tried his luck on Thursday. This one had Jordanian citizenship. He entered Israel from Jordan, across the Allenby Bridge, apparently claiming that he intended to participate in a Muslim religious festival. Somewhere in the midst of all his prayers and spiritual contemplation, he took time out to procure a large knife and then tried to murder a Jewish policewoman. His luck did run out—he was killed before he could complete the attack.
Jordan, of course, has plenty of police officers. But no Jewish ones! This attacker had to go quite a long way, at considerable expense and inconvenience, to find a Jewish target. And he found one.
And to round out the week, an IDF reservist was stabbed by his Palestinian attacker near the Jewish community of Efrat. The would-be murderer was, according to reports, hiding in bushes along the road when he jumped out and stabbed the soldier.
Stephen M. Flatow, an attorney in New Jersey, is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995.
