Posted: 11 Nov 2014 11:01 AM PST
Yesterday afternoon a young woman stood by the side of a road
holding up a sign. It read “Gush Etzion”. Those two words summon up
spittle-flecked rants about Zionist settlements from the anti-Israel left.
But
for Dalia, it was just home. And then it wasn’t.
Dalia caught a ride to a bus stop on the way home from her job as a
children’s occupational therapist. Her next stop was a shift at Yad Sarah, a
volunteer organization for the elderly and disabled.
But before that could happen, a Muslim attacker did what songs, cartoons and
posters distributed by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas encouraging “Car
Jihad” had been telling him to do.
He ran her over with a Mazda van.
With the 26-year-old woman on the ground, the courageous Islamic Jihadist
stabbed her as she lay dying. Then shouting Allahu Akbar, he began slashing
at an unarmed man who had stopped to help. When the unarmed man fighting him
off with his bare hands proved too much for the knife-wielding Jihadist, the
killer fled, was wounded and taken into custody.
Dalia’s father, a volunteer with Magen David Adom, Israel’s Red Cross, heard
that there had been an attack. He did what countless Israeli fathers and
mothers began doing right after they heard the news. He called his daughter.
There was no answer.
Despite being only in her twenties, Dalia knew what was coming. This wasn’t
her killer’s first act of terrorism and it wasn’t her first time as a victim
of Islamic terrorism.
When she was seventeen years old, Dalia was attacked by a knife-wielding
terrorist in the same place. But the terrorist didn’t have a van and there
were armed men at the scene.
“I stood on February 28, 2006 at Gush Etzion Junction when a terrorist came
and began to stab those standing at a hitchhiking station,” she would later
write.
She described terrorists for whom prison life is “like a hotel”, who watch
television, take courses and contact their lawyers. “Those who stab Jews have
their rights and privileges. The injustice cries out to Heaven.”
“Punish and expel those who threaten us," Dalia wrote, “no matter the
cost to them. They must pay the price for their terror. That is the only way
the terrorism will end.”
As you read this, Dalia Lemkus will have already been buried. Her parents and
her five brothers and sisters will have cried over her grave. Her killer will
receive the best possible care in an Israeli hospital. The Palestinian
Authority will use the foreign aid it receives from the United States and the
European Union to pay him a salary for life. If he gets out, he will be
entitled to everything from special housing to free medical care paid for by
you, by me and by all of us.
Stabbing
a young woman in the neck while she lay in the street made him a hero of
Palestine. He has become a model of Muslim manhood, little boys in UNRWA schools
will be taught about his great deed and encouraged to follow in his
footsteps. And they will, just as he had followed the example of those great
Muslim heroes who had murdered Jewish women and children in Hebron before he
was born.
The educational system staffed by Hamas supporters and paid for by foreign
aid does its work well. Some countries turn out future doctors and
scientists. The Palestinian Authority turns out heroes who can nerve
themselves up to take on a 26-year-old Jewish woman as long as they have a
few thousand pounds of van or at least a butcher knife on their side. Not to
mention Allah and the Koran.
Dalia’s killer may remain behind bars where Amnesty International and Human
Rights Watch will complain that his smartphone isn’t fast enough, that his
Coca Cola isn’t fizzy enough and that the clothes he shops for remotely with
his family using the money that the Palestinian Authority pays to the
families of its heroes don’t fit him correctly. But it’s also possible that
he will be set free.
He was before.
Dalia’s killer had been in jail for terrorism before he was released.
Releasing terrorists is how Israel demonstrates its goodwill toward
terrorists.
This year, Obama forced Israel to free over a hundred convicted terrorists as
a “gesture” just to get the Palestinian Authority terrorists to discuss
continuing talks with Israel. Israel was being pressured into releasing
terrorists in exchange for an opportunity to negotiate resuming negotiations.
And Israel freed most of the terrorists until the PLO broke the deal and went
to the UN.
Secretary of State John Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
that it was Israel’s fault because it “didn’t release the Palestinian
prisoners on the day they were supposed to be freed.”
The next time that Obama and Kerry force Israel to release terrorists for the
opportunity to negotiate the possibility of negotiating with terrorists,
Dalia’s killer may be shouting “Allahu Akbar” all over again. And if Israel
doesn’t release him on the day that Obama and the PLO want him released, it
will be blamed for not wanting peace. What better way is there to achieve
peace than by freeing terrorists?
Dalia left her comments on talkbacks in which Israelis shout to be heard
above the reassuring lies told by their media. Now she has been silenced. She
will be buried in her native town of Tekoa where her body will rest unless
the left and their Islamic partners succeed in forcing the expulsion of the
thousand Jews of Tekoa, the living in the houses and the dead from the town
cemetery.
The
State Department, which rejects the existence of the living and dead Jews of
Tekoa and wants them gone, responded to Dalia’s murder by urging both sides
to show restraint.
The AP’s Matt Lee asked State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki whether she
meant that Israelis should show restraint by standing still and allowing
themselves to be stabbed.
“If you’re standing at a bus stop or something and someone runs a car into
you or comes up and stabs you, I don’t know how to, I mean, those people
aren’t, don’t need to exercise restraint, do they?”
Psaki laughed and refused to address the question. But it’s a question that
ought to be addressed.
Israel is constantly ordered to show restraint. It is told that its response
to Muslim terrorism is disproportionate. But when does proportionate
restraint begin? Is it when a Muslim terrorist is running you over with a van
and sinking his knife into your neck? Or is it only when the terrorist is
down and you contemplate doing something about the men who sent him and will
continue sending more like him?
Israel is generously allowed to fight back once the knife is at its neck. But
once it breaks free, then it’s told to show restraint. Taking out the
terrorist networks that send out men like this would be disproportionate.
Refusing to release the killer of Dalia would show that Israel doesn’t want
peace.
And no matter what Israel does, how much it sacrifices, how many young women
it buries in its cemeteries after they have been run over, stabbed or blown
up, no matter how many of their killers it releases, it is always guilty of
not wanting peace badly enough.
Critics of Israel like Jeffrey Goldberg insist that its situation is not
“sustainable”. And that’s true.
Struggling with an attacker who has a knife at your throat is not
sustainable. Either he cuts your throat or you cut his throat. If every time
you get enough breathing room to fight back, you try to negotiate with him,
instead of doing to him what he’s trying to do to you, then eventually he
will kill you.
Dalia
survived her first attack. She didn’t survive her second attack. There are
only so many second chances when someone wants to kill you. And if you are a
non-Muslim in the Muslim world, then someone always wants to kill you.
The price of restraint is death. Negotiating with your killers lets them
trade up from a knife to a van, from a stone to a rocket, from an outpost in
Lebanon to fortresses within range of your major cities.
Dalia tried to warn Israelis. She tried to warn the world. Now her voice speaks
from the grave. It is the voice of the dead. It is the voice of truth.
“They must pay the price for their terror. That is the only way the terrorism
will end.”
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger
and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
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