June 1, 2011 - 11:48 pm
I had briefly forgotten, when I wrote about my visit last summer to the West Bank city of Hebron, that the infamous Baruch Goldstein massacre—he shot and killed 29 Palestinians and wounded 125 others—had taken place there. I knew about it, of course, and I remember when it happened, but the incident’s location wasn’t something that had firmly impressed itself on me, partly because I had never been there. So I wasn’t thinking about it when I visited Hebron, and it didn’t come up in conversation while I was there, so I didn’t include it in my recent dispatch.
I wish I had, though, because it’s an important part of the story. Goldstein all by himself killed almost half as many people as an Arab mob killed in the infamous massacre of 1929, an incident I did put a great deal of emphasis on. Goldstein’s bloody deed isn’t the only violent act committed by Jews against Arabs in Hebron, but it’s certainly, and by far, the nastiest.
Jewish terrorism doesn’t take up a large space in my consciousness for a reason that I trust is obvious—it’s rare. Goldstein shocked and appalled almost every Jew in the world when he murdered those people. One of their own became a full-blown no-way-to-whitewash-it mass-murdering terrorist. He was killed when some of his would-be victims beat him to death, but had he survived, the Israelis would have thrown him in a cage and left him there for the rest of his days.
All cultures produce murderers, all cultures produce political extremists, and all cultures produce individuals who combine the two into deadly concoctions. Israeli society, though, does a pretty good job policing these people and ensuring that their following is both miniscule and marginalized. So I’m not particularly concerned about the moral health of Israeli society, and I’m entirely unconvinced that the defective people it does produce are numerous or dangerous enough to prevent peace in the Middle East.
Palestinian society produces far more violent extremists, and they hold a massive amount of power in Palestinian politics. There is no getting around this. Hamas rules the entire Gaza Strip with an iron fist and is now part of a “national unity government” with Fatah, a party founded by Yasser Arafat that has no shortage of terrorists among its own ranks.
The Sunni and Shia militias that engaged in murderous sectarian “cleansing” operations against each other in Iraq were more or less equivalent morally, so I described them as such when I filed reports from Baghdad. The violent Israeli settlers in Hebron—and there are some—in no way compare to the Palestinian terrorist organizations that waged such massive and relentless campaigns of mass murder that it took the powerful Israeli army years to put them down.
There’s a serious asymmetry between the two sides, and that’s why I don’t place an equal amount of emphasis on the amount of criminal violence each side commits. Jews and Israelis everywhere recoil in horror from the likes of Baruch Goldstein, but public squares in Palestinian cities are named after suicide bombers and other killers of innocents.
I take no pleasure in saying so. I have far more affection for the Arab world than I ever thought I would, and I’d really like to see their political culture repaired, not just for the sakes of Americans and Israelis who suffer when the Middle East exports its violence, but also for the people who live in Arab societies. I’ve spent enough of my life among Arabs now that it’s just not possible for me to watch their societies implode and explode with indifference. If that doesn’t come across in every single blog post I write, I’m certain that it comes across loud and clear in my book.
Read the rest, it is worthy, of this article on: 
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Please Ephraim come home!
So what can We say? Yudah and Ephraim – Israelites! Not Arab, Roots in Judea and Samaria. The truth has to come up: Is there a possibility that more than thousand Ephraimites sign a document for an Ephraimite counsel with an embassy in Jerusalem with the desire to be recognized and the possibility to live in their Elohim given Land without becoming a Jew but living together with the Jews as Israel? Click: Sign the petition for Ephraim That their comes an 'Ephraim-Mars' to the Land of Israel filled with Love and Compassion from Abba YHWH for the Jews and our Land.... .
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