Three Funerals.. And The End of The Beginning

Today, three young Jewish boys were laid to rest.The bodies of Eyal Yifrach, 19, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Naftali Frenkel, also 16 (HY"D)were buried in Modi'in in a ceremony that was attended by thousands of Israelis in what became a day of national mourning.





The bodies of the three boys, kidnapped by Hamas operatives on June 12 were found in a shallow grave near the Arab village of Halhul, just north of Hebron. According to Israeli forensic experts, they were murdered in cold blood shortly after they were kidnapped and buried hastily as their kidnappers fled. But not too hastily. As one of my sources on the scene let me know yesterday,the killers took the time first before they shoved the corpses into the hole to mutilate the boys' bodies in classic Arab fashion.Israel's Channel Two described the condition of the bodies as 'harrowing'.

This was meant to send a message to the Israelis. So was the attack on the clearly marked ambulance carrying the murdered boys' bodies to Israel to be buried, and the widespread instances of celebration of the 'victory' by Arabs living under the Palestinian Authority. and even in Israel itself.



Nor are children left untouched by this poison.They're being indoctrinated as the next generation of murderers in the name of Allah.







The message, of course, is the same one the Arabs whom call themselves Palestinians have been sending ever since Yasser Arafat invented them. To them, or at least to the majority, this is a tribal war to the knife, no holds barred and none of the niceties of civilized behavior apply. They want the Jews ethnically cleansed by whatever means necessary. There is no desire for peace or real negotiation, no farcical 'two state solution' so beloved of the West and what remains of the Israeli Left. And that message is being sent out every day by Hamas, who are at least more honest about the matter and Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah, on whose official Facebook page the image immediately above this paragraph appeared.

After these murders, the message finally may be beginning to sink in with most Israelis, especially given the response from the West. After all, the Palestinians are whom they are, and their brutality is to be expected.But the civilized nations of the West?

The Israelis can't have failed to notice that for all the pro-forma condemnations from the US, the UN and the EU, the underlying message is 'so sad your children got murdered, but you ought to be used to that by now. We're still going to continue funding the new Fatah-Hamas government because they're one big happy family now, so the important thing for Israel is to exercise is restraint. Suck it up.'

To be totally honest about the matter, it is difficult for me to express adequately the way that message makes me feel...that the American government now funds and supports a genocidal group that would celebrate my murder or the murder of my loved ones just as enthusiastically as they're celebrating the murder of those three boys. Three unarmed boys murdered in cold blood, whom Wafa, the PA owned news service referred to as 'three soldiers'. I admit that I still haven't sorted out my feelings on that one, but my thoughts are far from pleasant.

President Barack Hussein Obama, the leader of the country that is supposed to be Israel's strongest ally had nothing to say at all about the matter for three weeks, and finally released a statement pretty much along these same lines once the bodies were found, perhaps because someone in the State Department reminded him it might be a good idea to say something. In contrast, that supposed cold fish, Russia's Vladimir Putin, made several calls to Israeli PM Netanyahu and Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman over the newly installed Jerusalem-Moscow secure hotline during the crisis, and took the time and trouble after the bodies were found to compose a hand written letter to Netanyahu, asking him to express Putin's personal condolences to the boys' families.

Our State Department reacted in a particularly  Kafka-esque fashion. They went out of their way not to blame their new Hamas friends while admitting they were involved. And no, I'm not kidding in the least:

Encouraging restraint from both the Israeli government— livid over the finding of the bodies of the missing on Monday, vowing to exact justice on the perpetrators— and from the Palestinian leadership, some of whom are calling the trial an Israeli conspiracy, and all of whom are bracing for reprisal, State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters that the US is intimate with intelligence on the case, in part since one of the dead teenagers was American.

"Many indications" suggest the murders constitute a terrorist attack, Harf said. "I'm not saying they're responsible," she said. "But they were involved."

 Hamas involved, but of course, not responsible for what's not necessarily a terrorist attack. Got it ? Maybe it was a three way suicide. Who knows? And those rockets and mortar rounds being fired at Israel's civilians? Meteorites of course!

The Israelis have buried their dead. and now they must decide what to do..and they must make that decision realizing that any action they take will be criticized by the same usual suspects now weeping crocodile tears over three dead Jewish kids whose nation is the only one in the world considered 'illegitimate'. Israel, a nation labeled an 'occupier' without occupying, a country called 'apartheid' where Arabs have more legal and political rights than anywhere in the Middle East and a country to whom very different rules always apply when it comes to defending themselves.

If you need any further proof of that, just imagine the reaction from these same quarters if a team of Israelis had kidnapped and murdered a trio of Arab youths. Of course, in the unlikely event that happened, the families of the Israeli perpetrators wouldn't be talking about how proud they are of the killers. And the Israelis wouldn't be in the streets& ululating and celebrating about their 'victory' or teaching their children how heroic it was to murder Arab children. But flip the coin, and there's no problem with Arabs murdering Jews, bathetic rhetoric aside. There's no mention of 'collective punishment' when Arabs murder 3 Jews simply because they're Jews. At least not with the Obama team, the EU and the UN. And of course, the funding keeps coming regardless, no matter what.

Israel is by no means a perfect nation, but they are, for the most part a moral and a humane one.  And that fact is being cynically used by their enemies to destroy them, bit by bit. Israel cannot allow this to continue, not if they wish to survive as a free people in their own country.

If Israel allows this atrocity to go unanswered, if they allow this to be one more straw that hasn't broken the camel's back ( or it's heart) yet, they will simply invite more of the same.  Whether they want to acknowledge it or not, there is no two state solution no matter what John Kerry or the UN might imagine. As Yasser Arafat said long ago, either Israel or 'Palestine'  is going to survive. and that's why all of Israel's 'sacrifices for peace' all its 'goodwill gestures' , all its attempts to treat the Palestinians humanely and to bend to pressure to the point of almost breaking in half have come to nothing. And none of it means anything next to the Arab envy and lust for Jewish land and blood.

The Jews learned, or should have learned a long time ago that you can't co-exist with Amalek. The only possibility for peace is to destroy his ability to attack you utterly, to take away his bases and his weapons and drive him out if necessary, or at least mark out boundaries and let him know he approaches or tries to cross at his peril. True and lasting peace comes from victory.

Over thirty years ago, Israel, prodded by President Clinton did something no Arab country was willing to do for the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians. They gave them some land to rule themselves in, and later, they did the same thing in Gaza after iron clad assurances by the PA, the EU and the U.S that Gaza would never become a security problem for Israel. And Israel has been paying the price in blood ever since. It's time this horrible war of attrition ended. Long past time. That blood debt cries out for redemption, and that is the only language the Arabs whom call themselves Palestinians will understand.

There's something symbolic about the place where these children were buried, Modi'in. It's the place where a farmer who acted as a local rabbi called Mattathias finally decided that enough was enough, refused to bow down to a Seleucid Greek pagan idol and started the Maccabee revolt in 165 CE in Judea.

 

Like the Israelis today, the Jews then were confronted by a powerful nation, a world power  pressuring them to do its will and succumb. They didn't and against all the odds they won their freedom. Modi'in was the place where it all began,and it would be fitting if today's funeral at Modi'in was the spark of a new beginning for Israel.

It will not be easy or painless, simply because the obvious has been delayed so long. Many of Israel's so-called 'friends' will scream bloody murder, but then they were never friends to begin with anyway. Others will understand,and they will count for much more in the end than those who give lip service to 'supporting Israel' but fund a genocidal group pledged to Israel's destruction.

If a nation means anything, it means that it protects its commerce,its borders and its citizens and makes attacks on them so painful and costly that its enemies think twice and forbear. It means there are certain things it simply does not take. It means that a nation and its citizens have the right to stand upright and stop living on their knees.Without that message, a nation means nothing.

And that's the message Israel has avoided since Oslo and must send now...clearly, forcefully and unmistakeably.