The writer is an Italian journalist with Il Foglio who also writes for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter. His writing has appeared in many publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary.
During a program aired on Palestinian television, the aunt of one of the Palestinians who took part in the brutal murder of five members of the Fogel family in Itamar referred to him as a “hero” and “legend”.
In response to the aunt’s comments, the show’s host said: “We also wish them [the murderers] well”.
The aunt went on to read a poem she had written in the murderers’ honor, while Hakim Awad’s mother sent her regards to her son and proudly mentioned that he was the perpetrator of the Itamar massacre.
Ruth Fogel was in the bathroom when Awad killed her husband Udi and their three-month-old daughter Hadas, slitting their throats as they lay asleep in bed. Awad slaughtered Ruth as she came out of the bathroom.
Then he moved into a bedroom where Ruth and Udi’s sons Yoav (11) and Elad (4) were sleeping. He then slit their throats.
In court, Awad smiled at the camera, he said he has “no regrets” and flashed the “V” sign for victory while he was leaving the courthouse. “I am a person like you, I have no mental condition, I never had a serious illness", Awad said to the judges.
His smile was sincere. The slaughterer of Itamar’s babies was unabashed, as very few, other than the Nazis and Khmer Rouge, ever were.
The Itamar killers' ideology characterizes Jews as “satanic”. Generations of Arab children, like Awad, are taught to hate Israeli “freedom-haters”, “monsters”, “sadists”, “madmen”, “gangsters” and “devils”.
Killing a demon or the children of demons (like the little Fogels) is not like taking the life of a fellow human being.
Itamar’s killers remind us that genocidal anti-Semitism wasn’t buried in the ashes of Auschwitz.
Awad’s smile and his aunt’s praise convey unleashed hatred and the desire to expel, to destroy, to eliminate the Jews.
It's the same smile on the face of Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief in southeastern France from 1942 to 1944, who laughed all the time as his Jewish victims described the torture Nazis put them through, testifying at court in 1997.
It's the same hatred that filled Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann’s “best man” during the "final solution". Brunner was interviewed in the Austrian news magazine Bunte. He said he did not suffer from a bad conscience for, in his own words, “getting rid of that garbage” (the Jews). His one regret was that he hadn’t murdered more Jews.
In 1987, in a telephone interview, Brunner told the Chicago Sun Times: “The Jews deserved to die. I have no regrets. If I had the chance I would do it again…”.
Like Alois Brunner’s Aryanism, Itamar’s perpetrators see themselves as messengers of Allah sent to wipe out Jewish born and unborn babies. They are bent on total confrontation, on pursuing an either-or politics of victory or death.
The "aktion" in Itamar action has been publicly proclaimed in the name of Allah, his Prophet and the Koran. No rational argument can be used against an ideology maniacally dedicated to Jewish destruction, and that says so in every language, at every opportunity.
The authoritarian regime that rules the Arabs in the PA wants to eradicate Jewish life everywhere, in Itamar as well as in Zichron Yaakov.
After anti-Semitism which barred Jews from public office in the waning days of the Roman Empire; after the 1096 Crusaders’ mass murder of Jewish communities in Germany; after the 1215 Vatican Council’s yellow-badge decree, which made the Jew carry his own discrimination wherever he went; after the late Medieval expulsions, which made the threat of displacement a hallmark of the Jewish psyche; after the 1648 massacres in East Europe; after Nazi anti-Semitism, which depicted the Jews as nearly anyone’s demon; after the Stalinists’ “rootless Jewish cosmopolitans” - it’s now the era of the Itamar pogromists.
Jews have sustained the longest living liberation movement in human history. Itamar’s pogromists now want to deliver them to the final “liberation".