Armchair barbarism

Melanie Phillips

Today the massacred Fogel family was buried in Jerusalem. And as anticipated, the moral depravity of the Arabs is finding a grotesque echo in the moral bankruptcy and worse of the British and American ‘liberal’ media – a sickening form of armchair barbarism which is also in evidence, it has to be said, on the comment thread beneath my post below.

Overwhelmingly, the media have either ignored or downplayed the atrocity – or worse, effectively blamed the victims for bringing it on themselves, describing them as ‘hard-line settlers’ or extremists. Given that three of the victims were children, one a baby of five months whose throat was cut, such a response is utterly degraded. The New York Times blamed Israeli ‘defiance’ over renewed ‘settlement’ building in the wake of the massacre for throwing

already shaky peace efforts into a new tailspin.

So to the New York Times, it’s not the Arab massacre of a Jewish family which has jeopardised ‘peace prospects’ -- because the Israelis will quite rightly never trust any agreement with such savages -- but instead Israeli policy on building more homes, on land to which it is legally and morally entitled, which is responsible instead for making peace elusive. Twisted, and sick.

Both CNN and the BBC, meanwhile, gave the impression that this was not a terrorist attack but the actions of an ‘intruder’ -- for all the world as if this was a burglary that got out of hand. CNN said:

Five members of an Israeli family were killed in the West Bank early Saturday morning in what the Israeli military is calling a ‘terror attack’...According to a military spokeswoman, an intruder entered the Israeli settlement of Itamar near the northern West Bank city of Nablus around 1 am, made his way into a family home and killed two parents and their three children.

The BBC similarly reported:

The family - including three children -- were stabbed to death by an intruder who broke into their home, Israeli media reported...

Honest Reporting finds the BBC treatment of this massacre, all but burying the details of the attack on the Fogel family beneath a story about those wicked settlements, the most shocking and callous of all this dreadful coverage.

For those who don’t appreciate the role played by the ‘moderate’ PA in glorifying terrorism and inciting the mass murder of Israelis, Palestinian Media Watch has assembled some recent examples here – including the award by Abbas of $2000 to the family of a terrorist who attacked and tried to kill Israeli soldiers two months ago.

(Graphic pictures of the bodies of the slain Fogel family are circulating on the net and on YouTube. The relatives of the massacre victims have made them publicly available in order to show the world the full horror of the Arab barbarism in Itamar. However, I have decided not to link to these pictures. The reported wishes of a distraught family cannot in my view justify what is inescapably a gratuitous invasion of the privacy and dignity of the dead.)

What is being deliberately ignored through this travesty of reporting is not just the human tragedy of this terrible massacre. It is the politically crucial fact that it was apparently carried out not by Hamas but by the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, the terrorist wing of Fatah. Fatah is the party of Mahmoud Abbas, the Holocaust denier who is the allegedly ‘moderate’ Chairman of the PA – and who not surprisingly couldn’t even bring himself to express unequivocal horror at the atrocity.

This diabolical deed therefore gives the lie to all those who have been supporting, promoting and funding the PA as ‘moderates’ who deserve a state of their own. The fact is that America, Britain and the EU have been not only promoting this bunch of neo-Nazi fanatics and baby murderers. They have also been forcing their putative victim, Israel, to offer them its own throat to be cut, along with that of Jewish babies. And these craven governments in turn are being egged on by the bigots, useful idiots and worse of the British, European and -- it has to be said loud and clear -- Israeli ‘liberal’ intelligentsia.

Truly, this is beyond desolation.