I am not surprised that Arabs do not condemn killing of Jews as terror because while they claim that they condemn “terrorism” – they do not classify the killing of non Muslims as “terrorism”. As for the despicable “moral relativists” of the media (The BBC, the A.P., Reuters, The New York Times etc.) , and the left-wing chattering classes – they long ago sold their souls  and are reflexive apologists for any barbarity perpetrated by “third world liberationists”.

by John Podhoretz

Throughout the Arab world, ordinary people by the thousands and millions are clamoring for political change that will alter their lives for the better. Meanwhile, in the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, Palestinians are blowing up Jews.

We don’t know where the conflagrations in countries from Tunisia to Egypt to Bahrain to Syria will lead. Some portents — like Egypt’s vote over the weekend, which proved to be a show of power by the radical Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood — are frightening.

But that doesn’t change the fact that these earthshaking events are the result of people attempting to seize the rights to their own destinies.

Meanwhile, a single Arab populace living under two authoritarian diktats — one run by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, one by Hamas in Gaza — remains quiet and sullen and inactive. And the terrorists in their midst fire rockets at Jewish towns and detonate city buses.

In Libya, heroic Americans in the Navy and Air Force are protecting powerless civilians from the wrath of the madman Moammar Khadafy — civilians whose only crime is wanting Khadafy gone after 42 years of his noxious dictatorship.

Meanwhile, as 30 people lay bleeding in a hospital and one was declared dead after yesterday’s detonation of a Jerusalem bus stop, the Reuters news agency published this sentence: “Police said it was a ‘terrorist attack’ — Israel’s term for a Palestinian strike.”

Yes, blowing up a municipal conveyance on which pople are going to work is, to Reuters, a “strike” — a term usually reserved for a surprise raid on, say, an ammo dump or an enemy military base or a Libyan anti-aircraft battery.

For Reuters, as for the evil monsters who pushed the button, Jews on a bus are nothing more than a target.

Reuters was joined in its rhetorical barbarity by the Pulitzer Prize-winning international sob sister Nicholas Kristof, of The New York Times. He tweeted this in the wake of the news: “Terror attack in Jerusalem is inexcusable, and hurts Palestinian cause. Arab militancy feeds Israeli militancy and [visa versa].”

Note what he does here. After covering his self-regarding posterior with the word “inexcusable,” Kristof swings directly into moral equivalency.

Fact is, you can count on one hand and a couple of fingers the number of terrorist attacks committed by “Israeli militants” over the course of the last 60 years. The number of attacks committed in the name of “Arab militancy”?

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Read the rest: Making excuses for terror

Benny Avni points out the obvious – that combining democratic means with a violent philosophy and tactics is a poisonous drink. The recent aggressions coming out of Gaza should waken people up to the fact that Israel ought not to have any doubts that restricting their responses in order to meet Western expectations of “proportionality” is a fools task.

by Benny Avni

Yesterday’s horrific bombing in Jerusalem and the ongoing barrage of mortars from Gaza into Israel have more to do with internal Palestinian politics than with the ancient struggle between Arab and Jew.

Terrorism is “never justified,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said yesterday in response to the deadly bombing near Jerusalem’s central bus station. She added, “Israel has to respond.”

But then she said “all sides” must avoid harming civilians — as if this were the start of another round of Israeli-Arab tit-for-tat.

This much is true: To defend its citizens, Israel targeted the launchers; on Tuesday, an error led to the accidental killing of three children and an elderly man in a field near the firing sources.

But, sorry: The return of Arab terrorism after a two-year lull has little to do with Israeli actions. Mostly, it’s the product of internal skirmishing — between two wings of Hamas, between Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups and between all of the above and Fatah.

It’s also a result of events in the rest of the Arab world — and a cautionary tale on how supporting democracy there can bring the exact opposite.

This month, five members of the Fogel family were knifed to death at the Jewish West Bank settlement of Itamar. Late last week, Hamas followed up by launching a sustained barrage of missiles from Gaza into Israeli towns, hitting southern cities as far as Ashdod and Beer Sheba.

Ever since the Gaza war at the end of 2008, Hamas has blamed runaway factions for sporadic mortar shooting into southern Israel. But now it is taking full responsibility for a huge escalation that includes the use of ever-more-sophisticated weapons.

All this didn’t come out of the blue. Like the rest of the world, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are intently watching frustrated Arabs rising against sclerotic rulers who’ve failed to deliver economic prosperity or end political backwardness. The Hamas rulers of Gaza, where such frustrations are as pronounced as anywhere in the Mideast, made clear early on that they’d violently quash any similar demonstrations in the strip.

Nevertheless, after a while they decided to allow some display of public discontent. Simultaneous marches in the West Bank and Gaza were permitted, as was their message: a call for “Palestinian unity.” The Gaza-based Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh even invited Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for a visit. Abbas, who hasn’t ventured into Gaza since Hamas violently drove his Fatah party out in 2006, agreed wholeheartedly.

Problem is, Haniyeh’s unity call upset more important Hamas power brokers.

To follow the players, go back to 2005, shortly after Israel withdrew from Gaza: The Bush administration, adamant advocate of Arab democracy, pushed for a hastened Palestinian parliamentary election. And Hamas, though not winning a majority of votes, won a majority of parliamentary seats thanks to the proportional-representation rules.

As winners, Hamas followed by brutally killing any Fatah rival in Gaza and chasing out any opponent who escaped death. And so, for half a decade we’ve effectively had two “Palestines”: an Islamist one in Gaza, and a pro-Western one in Ramallah and the rest of the West Bank.

To make it even more complex, the true control of Hamas rests not in the hands of Haniyeh’s Gaza leadership, but in Damascus, Syria. There, leaders like the group’s chief Khaled Meshal scoff at “Palestinian unity.”

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Read the rest: Killing their way out of a political mess