There is no denying the horrors of the terrorist attacks on Paris, and even some liberals and their media pals are beginning to chafe at the left’s refusal to call radical Islam by its name. So maybe we’ve reached a tipping point, and will henceforth be allowed to speak frankly about who the enemy is. Unless of course the terror victims are Israeli.
Israel faces acts of terror rooted in radical Islam daily – including insidious knife attack campaign currently going on in Israel’s streets. In the three months leading up to the ISIS’s deadly Paris attacks, the ABC CBS and NBC evening news programs have mentioned terror attacks on Israelis 30 times. Twenty-five of those stories describe the perpetrators as Palestinian. But not one made any mention of the words “Islam” or “Muslim” in reference to the attacks.
Besides calling for the destruction of Israel, Hamas’ charter makes plain that it is a religious movement and that it’s political aims are inseparable from Salafist Islam. Hezbollah is equally rooted in the radical Shia faith of the Iranian mullahs. Both claim to be waging jihad again Israel.
But news outlets conveniently tend to forget the connection between radical Islam and Palestinian attacks on Israelis, preferring to slap the political label on attackers, as when reporting “A Palestinian teenager fatally stabbed two ultra-Orthodox Jewish men in Jerusalem’s Old City on Saturday night, the Israeli police said, and wounded the wife of one of them. It was the second fatal attack on an Israeli family in three days.”
Of course, given their sympathies, the networks don’t like to acknowledge that Israel is facing terrorists. They prefer to call killers “militants” or “fighters” nine times more often than they’ll say “terrorists.”
So if they won’t call it terror, perhaps it’s too much to expect them to ascribe motives to radical Islam – even when the evidence is right there in their own stories. That same New York Times piece on the Old City stabbings included, “In response to the attack, Islamic Jihad said in a statement: “We bless this operation in Jerusalem and confirm that Israel is paying the price of its aggressive occupation and the resistance will continue and increase.”
Paris is hopefully a wakeup call for many. But while they yawn and stretch, they should remember that Israel is in the same boat dealing with these acts of Islamist terror – everyday.
