Israel Matzav

What Abu Bluff really said about Tuesday night's quadruple murder

On Wednesday morning, I quoted Abu Bluff's statement in English regarding Tuesday night's terror attack in which four Israelis were murdered, and then glossed over it because Salam Fayyad's statement in Arabic was so much worse.

David Hornik looks back at Abu Bluff's statement and shows that it wasn't much better.

Already the accepted version of events is that all three of the main leaders present at the Washington talks — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. President Barack Obama, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas — duly condemned the attack.

But before that “official” version slips through unchallenged, it’s worth looking at more closely.

Netanyahu, a patriotic Israeli whose distress at the attack is not in question, denounced its “savagery and brutality,” and the perpetrators as people who “trample human rights into the dust and butcher everything that they oppose.” Obama called the attack “senseless slaughter,” and though “senseless” is disputable since the attack can actually be traced to a deliberate strategy by Iran, the phrase is basically unobjectionable in the context.

The problem has to do with Abbas. On Tuesday night, he said he “condemns all acts that target Palestinian and Israeli civilians” and that the Hebron attack was meant to “disrupt the peace process and can’t be regarded as an act of resistance.”

What’s wrong with that shouldn’t need to be spelled out.

The reference to “all acts that target Palestinian and Israeli civilians” is reprehensible. It not only generalizes the attack and removes its specificity, but also exploits the attack to — once again — level an accusation at Israelis.

Even if that accusation was accurate, this would not have been the time to make it.

But it is, of course, inaccurate. Whereas thousands of Israeli civilians have been targeted by Palestinian attacks, Israel never targets Palestinian (or any other) civilians, and the few Israeli individuals who do so are viewed and treated as criminals.

Abbas, then, not only failed to condemn Tuesday night’s atrocious murder of four people but used it to smear Israel with what is essentially a blood libel.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:50 AM