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Never Again?
(Wall Street Journal) Leon De Winter - In A New Shoa: The Untold Story of Israel's Victims of Terrorism, Giulio Meotti, an Italian author and journalist, has written a monumental study of pain and grief, of mourning and remembrance, of hatred and love. Meotti makes clear that he considers Palestinian terrorism and Arab hatred of Israel and the Jews the continuation of Nazi anti-Semitism. He shows that Palestinian and Arab rhetoric is focused on Jews - not just Israelis. The dream of the Islamists is to destroy the Jewish people, not just the sliver of land called Israel. Meotti's list of murderous anti-Semitism by Palestinian leaders and media is exhausting. But it is a list the Western media ignore as it would destroy the prevailing narrative that the Mideast conflict is about land and Palestinian suffering. It isn't. It is about that old sickness, Jew-hatred. Meotti writes of "more than 150 suicide attacks carried out, plus more than 500 prevented. It's a black hole that in 15 years swallowed up 1,557 people and left 17,000 injured." This 400-page study of Jewish love of life is indispensable for anybody who wants to understand Israel's position in the world and the tragic position of the Jews in history. There is the story of Massoud Mahlouf Allon. "He was mutilated, bludgeoned and beaten to death while giving poor Palestinians the blankets he had collected from Israelis," Meotti recounts. Or the disabled Arnad, who was blown up in the seat of his motorized wheelchair in Jerusalem's Mahane Yehuda market. This book doesn't dumb down evil. It doesn't try to understand terrorists as victims of their socio-economic circumstances, doesn't miscategorize them as poor or uneducated (they are often middle class) or driven allegedly to despair by the very same people they murdered. No, in A New Shoah, the terrorists remain what they are, the executors of a hate-filled religious ideology.