Screaming “Allah akbar!”–the Islamic battlecry, “God is Great!”–two Palestinians wielding meat cleavers and a gun slaughtered five worshippers in a Jerusalem synagogue.
Three of the dead were Americans holding Israeli citizenship. Four of them were rabbis.
Eight people were injured—and one later died—before the attackers were killed in a shootout with police.
Aftermath of the attack on unarmed rabbis in a Jerusalem synagogue
The attack—launched on November 18—was the deadliest in Israel’s capital since 2008, when a Palestinian gunman shot eight people in a religious seminary school.
And how did Palestinians react to the grisly murders of five unarmed worshippers?
They celebrated:
- Revelers in the Gazan city of Rafah handed out candy and brandished axes and posters of the suspects in praise of the deadly attack.
- Hamas-affiliated social media circulated violent and anti-Semitic cartoons hailing the killings.
- Students in Bethlehem joined in the festivities by sharing candy.
Palestinians celebrating the attack
- The parents of the two terrorists joyfully declared: “They are both Shahids (martyrs) and heroes.”
- A resident of the terrorists’ neighborhood stated: “We have many more youngsters and nothing to lose. They are willing to harm Jews, anything for al-Aqsa.”
- Another resident said: “People here won’t sit quietly, they will continue to respond. We will make the lives of the Jews difficult everywhere.”
And how have Israelis responded to this latest atrocity?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the demolitions of the homes of the attackers.
The blunt truth is that Palestinians have no interest in preventing such attacks on Israeli citizens—because Israel hasn’t given them any.
Blowing up houses only takes out anger on lifeless buildings. Those who lived there are still alive—and able to seek revenge in the future.
As Niccolo Machiavelli once warned: But above all [a ruler] must abstain from taking the property of others, for men forget more easily the death of their father than the loss of their inheritance.
But there is an alternative which Israelis must almost certainly be considering at this time.
Its purpose: To instill a sense of civic responsibility—however begrudgingly—in their Islamic citizens.
Every time such an atrocity occurs, Israel could deport at least 10,000 Arabs from its territory.
Suddenly, Arabs living in Israel would have real incentive for preventing such attacks against Israelis. Or at least for reporting to police the intentions of those they knew were planning such attacks.
“Hey,” they would think, “if Abdul blows up that police station like he said he wants to, I could get sent to a refugee camp.”
The odds are there would be s sudden influx of Arab informants to Israeli police stations.
Machiavelli, the 15th century Florentine statesmen, carefully studied both war and politics. In his most famous—or infamous—work, The Prince, he advises:
Niccolo Machiavelli
From this arises the question whether it is better to be loved than feared, or feared more than loved. The reply is, that one ought to be both feared and loved, but as it is difficult for the two to go together, it is much safer to be feared than loved.
For it may be said of men in general that they are ungrateful, voluble, dissemblers, anxious to avoid danger and covetous of gain; as long as you benefit them, they are entirely yours: they offer you their blood, their goods, their life and their children, when the necessity is remote, but when it approaches, they revolt.
And the prince who has relied solely on their words, without making other preparations, is ruined; for the friendship which is gained by purchase and not through grandeur and nobility of spirit is bought but not secured, and at a pinch is not to be expended in your service.
And men have less scruple in offending one who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared; for love is held by a chain of obligations which, men being selfish, is broken whenever it serves their purpose; but fear is maintained by a dread of punishment which never fails.
Machiavelli knew–and warned–that while it was useful to avoid hatred, it was fatal to be despised. And he also warned that humility toward insolent enemies only encourages their hatred.
Accompanying this is the advice of perhaps the greatest general of the American Civil War: William Tecumseh Sherman.
Sherman, whose army cut a swath of destruction through the South in 1864, said it best. Speaking of the Southern Confederacy, he advised: “They cannot be made to love us, but they may be made to fear us.”
Israelis will never be able to make its sworn Islamic enemies love them. But they can instill such a healthy fear in most of them that such atrocities as the recent synagogue butchery will become a rarity.




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TERRORISTS AS VICTIMS
In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Military, Politics, Social commentary on January 7, 2015 at 12:02 amOn December 30, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced that Palestinians had joined the International Criminal Court to pursue war crimes charges against Israel.
“We want to complain. There’s aggression against us, against our land. The Security Council disappointed us,” Abbas said at a meeting of the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank.
Abbas has plenty to complain about. The Palestinian terrorist organization, Hamas, opened hostilities with Israel on July 7–and promptly lost the war.
In June, 2014, three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and murdered. Israeli authorities suspected the culprits were members of Hamas, the terrorist organization that’s long called for Israel’s destruction.
In a desperate search for the missing teens, Israeli forces killed 10 Palestinians, injured 130 and arrested 500 to 600 others.
Hamas, in turn, began launching rocket attacks on Israel from the Gaza Strip, which it has controlled since June, 2007. By July 7, 100 rockets had been fired at Israel.
Israeli planes retaliated by attacking 50 targets in Gaza.
On July 8, during a 24-hour period, Hamas fired more than 140 rockets into Israel from Gaza. Saboteurs also tried to infiltrate Israel from the sea, but were intercepted.
A Hamas rocket streaks toward Israel
That same day–July 8, 2014–Israel launched Operation Protective Edge, a full-scale military attack on Gaza.
Hamas then announced that it considered “all Israelis”–including women, children, the elderly and disabled–to be legitimate targets.
On July 8, Hamas–acting as though it were laying down peace terms to an already defeated Israel–issued the following demands:
Only then would Hamas be open to a ceasefire agreement. Egypt offered a cease-fire proposal. Israel quickly accepted it, temporarily stopping hostilities on July 15.
But Hamas claimed that it had not been consulted and rejected the agreement.
Palestinians continued to blithely launch hundreds of rockets at Israel–but went into ecstasies of grief before television cameras when one of their own was killed by Israeli return fire.
As a result, Israel has come under repeated verbal attacks by Hamas-sympathetic nations. The charge: Israel is being too effective at defending itself, killing more Palestinians than Hamas is able to kill Israelis.
Reuven Berko, a former soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) recently addressed this charge in a guest column in the online newsletter, the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT).
A major reason for so many civilian deaths among Palestinians, writes Berko, is that Hamas turns them into human shields by hiding its missiles in heavily-populated centers.
On July 17, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Far East (UNRWA) discovered approximately 20 rockets hidden in a vacant UN school in the Gaza Strip.
“UNRWA strongly condemns the group or groups responsible for placing the weapons in one of its installations,” said the agency in an announcement.
“This is a flagrant violation of the inviolability of its premises under international law.” UNRWA claimed that “this incident…is the first of its kind in Gaza.”
But Israel counters that this is just one of many proven instances of Hamas hiding its fighters and munitions among a heavily civilian population.
Click here: UNRWA Strongly Condemns Placement of Rockets in School | UNRWA
At the heart of Berko’s editorial is the subject of “proportionality.”
Writes Berko: “Israel is held to an impossible moral double standard. “Israelis, proportionality advocates seem to believe, should be killed by Hamas rockets instead of following Home Front Command instructions and running to shelters, to say nothing of Israel’s blatant unfairness in protecting its civilians with the Iron Dome aerial defense system….
“Anyone who demands that Israel agree to a life of terror governed by a continuous barrage of rockets and mortar shells on the heads of its women and children in the name of restraint and ‘proportionality’ would never agree to risk the safety of their own families in a similar situation.”
war against radical Islam if we can’t even name the enemy?”
Berko points out that during World War 11, the Allies didn’t hesitate to retaliate for the Nazi blitz of London. In February, 1945, British and American planes firebombed Dresden, killing about 25,000 people.
Nor did America feel guilty about dropping two atomic bombs on Japan, killing about 250,000 civilians.
Summing up his argument, Berko writes: “The ridiculous demand for proportionality contradicts every basic principle of warfare.“
According to American strategist Thomas Schelling, you have to strike your enemy hard enough to make it not worthwhile for him to continue…. “
In the Western world, killing someone in self-defense is considered justifiable homicide.”
Click here: Guest Column: The Double Standard of Proportionality: The Investigative Project on Terrorism
Berko could just as easily have ended his column with the words of Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, whose Union forces cut a swath of destruction across the South in his famous “March to the Sea.”
William Tecumseh Sherman
Wrote Sherman: “Those people made war on us, defied and dared us to come south to their country, where they boasted they would kill us and do all manner of horrible things.
“We accepted their challenge, and now for them to whine and complain of the natural and necessary results is beneath contempt.”
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