Four little girls

Six weeks ago, Israel launched a fatal missile strike against the "spiritual leader" of Hamas, Sheikh Yassin, and the world recoiled in horror. "War crime!" people cried. "Murder! The cowardly killing of an old blind man in a wheelchair!"

Today, gunmen from Hamas and Islamic Jihad walked up to a car containing a mother and her four daughters, aged 2 to 11, and shot them all dead at close range.

And you know the same people who were so shocked and outraged by the assasination of Yassin are already working on excuses. They were "settlers". The mother had a bumper sticker on her car speaking out against Sharon's plan to evacuate Gaza (a plan Israel's opponents also oppose, of course, because it doesn't involve the complete liquidation of the Jewish state). They had a nice car while Palestinians live in poverty. The children would have been conscripted someday, so they weren't really civilians. It's a Zionist conspiracy to make sure Likud members vote down the Sharon plan. The attack wasn't carried out by a state, so it wasn't really a war crime (never mind the well-documented rhetorical, political and financial support Arafat has given to these groups, of course).

And above all, they were Jews. And Jews aren't really human.

The world is sitting back and not just letting this happen, but encouraging the genocidal monsters who did it. Maybe that teenaged newspaper columnist I wrote about yesterday - the one who says the human race is a "disease" - had a point.

Update: It's already starting. Al-Jazeera's headline: "Five settlers killed in resistance strike".

The Arab CNN, ladies and gentlemen.

Posted by damian at May 2, 2004 11:49 AM