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Things We Need to Stop Hearing about the "Stabbing Intifada"

(Algemeiner) Bernard-Henri Levy - It is painful to hear the phrase "lone wolves" applied to the killers of Jews. It is equally painful to listen to the refrain about "Palestinian youth no longer subject to any control," after seeing the sermons in which preachers from Gaza, dagger in hand, call upon followers to take to the streets to maim as many Jews as they can, to inflict as much pain as possible and to spill the maximum amount of blood. It is doubly painful to hear that refrain from Mahmoud Abbas, describing as "heroic" the murder of the Henkins in the presence of their children, and then expressing indignation at seeing the "dirty feet" of Jews "defiling" the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Also inapplicable is the phrase about "political and social desperation" that is used to explain - or excuse - criminal acts. Everything we know about the new terrorists, their motives and the pride their relatives take in converting crime into martyrdom is much closer to the portrait of the jihadist who today turns up in Syria or Iraq. It is highly doubtful that "intifada" is the right term to apply to acts that bear more resemblance to the latest installment of a worldwide "jihad" of which Israel is just one of the stages. It is doubtful that the question of a negotiated partition of the land has anything to do with fanaticism and theories of vast conspiracy, in which some decide to stab random others as they pass by because of a vague rumor reporting a secret plot to deny Muslims access to Islam's third holiest site. Intolerable and inapplicable, too, is the cliche of the "cycle" or "spiral" of violence, which, by putting the kamikaze killers and their victims on the same footing, sows confusion and amounts to an incitement to further action. Intolerable, again, that most of the major media have paid the grieving Israeli families only a fraction of the attention they have paid the families of the perpetrators. Intolerable, finally, the minor mythology growing up around the story of daggers. When I see those blades, I think of the one used to execute Daniel Pearl; I think of the beheadings of Herve Gourdel, James Foley and David Haines. I think that the Islamic State's videos have clearly gained a following, and that we stand on the threshold of a form of barbarity that must be unconditionally denounced if we do not want to see its methods exported everywhere. And I mean everywhere. The writer is one of France's most famed philosophers, a journalist, and a bestselling writer.
2015-10-23 00:00:00
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