Though the deadly mission of Wafa Idris, who managed to murder an 81-year-old Israeli and wound 150 others in the heart of Jerusalem, was not unique, her gender was. And, as with the coverage of the deaths of so many other Palestinian murderers, the broadcast networks as well as America's leading newspapers managed to turn her, rather than her Israeli victims, into the focus of the story.
Gillian Finley of ABC News, James Bennet of The New York Times, Lee Hockstader of The Washington Post and Michael Matza of The Philadelphia Inquirer all played the story in the same way - with a sympathetic profile of the killer and her grieving but proud relatives.
While there is nothing new about this obscene concentration on a Palestinian killer while all but ignoring the Israeli victims, one twist used to tell this story, common to all of these journalists mentioned, was to speak of Idris as a woman who been unhinged by the suffering of her people, which she'd witnessed as a Red Crescent Society volunteer.
If that justification sounds familiar, it should. It was the same bogus argument put forward by friends and family of Baruch Goldstein, the Kiryat Arba physician who in 1994 murdered 29 Arabs in cold blood at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Goldstein's despicable action was similarly justified by a tiny minority of Jews because he, too, as an emergency worker, had witnessed Jewish blood shed at the hands of the Palestinians.
At that time, persons who rationalized Goldstein's mad act by citing his medical experience were rightly stigmatized as justifying terrorism. Yet somehow, the same argument now is made to sound reasonable when it is applied to someone who kills Jews.
jewishworldreview.com |
