Thursday, September 15, 2005
What would happen if mosques were burned — and other silly questions
Then, just as now, as the shocking events unfolded, there was a strong current of Jewish opinion that counseled us to not take it so seriously. The excuse for the sack of Joseph's Tomb was that the yeshiva there was an irritant to the Arab population of the city.
So, too, we are now told that the results of the Palestinian Mardi Gras in Gaza this week shouldn't upset us. It was Israel's fault for not destroying the synagogues themselves before leaving since the sites were symbols of the hated Jewish presence.
The priority, the editorialists at Ha'aretz, which styles itself the "New York Times of Israel," is to "douse the flames," and not to criticize the Palestinians for what Silvan Shalom, Israel's current foreign minister, rightly termed "barbarism."
Going one better than the real New York Times, which wrote of the burnings only in passing, The Philadelphia Inquirer's Israel correspondent Michael Matza omitted it entirely from his dispatch. Readers of that newspaper were only informed of the vandalism in a caption to a picture of a Palestinian mob making merry atop a demolished synagogue in Netzarim.
But as Yossi Klein Halevi, senior fellow at the Shalem Center, said in an e-mail to me about the subject, "We can't expect the rest of the world to feel greater rage than Ha'aretz feels."
So, too, we are now told that the results of the Palestinian Mardi Gras in Gaza this week shouldn't upset us. It was Israel's fault for not destroying the synagogues themselves before leaving since the sites were symbols of the hated Jewish presence.
The priority, the editorialists at Ha'aretz, which styles itself the "New York Times of Israel," is to "douse the flames," and not to criticize the Palestinians for what Silvan Shalom, Israel's current foreign minister, rightly termed "barbarism."
Going one better than the real New York Times, which wrote of the burnings only in passing, The Philadelphia Inquirer's Israel correspondent Michael Matza omitted it entirely from his dispatch. Readers of that newspaper were only informed of the vandalism in a caption to a picture of a Palestinian mob making merry atop a demolished synagogue in Netzarim.
But as Yossi Klein Halevi, senior fellow at the Shalem Center, said in an e-mail to me about the subject, "We can't expect the rest of the world to feel greater rage than Ha'aretz feels."
