Opinion: We Don’t Need the World’s Permission to Defend Ourselves

Waiting for the world to condemn and pay lip service to Israel’s fight against terrorism is a dead end in every sense of the word. It will never happen. We are a sovereign nation. We do not need the world’s permission to defend ourselves against those who seek our destruction.

“Now there is one less of them,” a Danish Facebook user wrote gleefully after a 13-year-old Jewish girl was stabbed to death in her sleep in her bedroom by a Palestinian man. He thought that the heinous, cowardly murder of an innocent child in her sleep was simply a part of “the resistance” against the Jews.

What kind of human being seeks to justify the cowardly murder of an innocent child in her sleep? Imagine the outcry, if that child had been an Arab and its murderer a Jew. The news would have caused an uproar on the front pages of all the news outlets in the world. Since the girl was Jewish, needless to say, the latter did not happen.

The Israel-Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch, Sari Bashi, could not just do the decent thing and condemn the murder but had to tweet instead that “settlements are illegal, but settlers are NOT legitimate targets.” What sickening times we live in, when a human rights organization cannot bring itself to say more than that the murder of a sleeping Jewish child is not legitimate. Bashi had no response to Mark Halawa, who told her, “I was one of those brainwashed Palestinian children. All Jews are our targets. This settler nonsense you speak of is for idiots!” Contrast that with Bashi’s tweet from June 27, when she emotionally gushed, “Powerful, chilling research by B’Tselem on boy killed, cousins hurt when Israeli soldiers sprayed car with bullets.”

The Palestinian Authority was very quick to honor the terrorist. According to Palestinian Media Watch, Fatah’s official Facebook page immediately posted his picture, declaring him a shahid (martyr) — the highest honor achievable in Islam. WAFA, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, honored him as well. The murderer’s family will immediately start receiving a monthly stipend that the PA pays to the families of all “martyrs.”

On Twitter, the EU Embassy in Israel was asked for a response to the fact that the EU funds are used to fund these stipends. Their response was “technical,” as always: “We are not claiming that the payments have stopped. However, FYI, technically, they are no longer paid by the PA but by the PLO.”

In plain English: The EU is fine with supporting terrorism, and knowingly does so, as long as the support is indirect — inasmuch as you can tell the PLO and the PA apart, which you cannot.

The EU Embassy’s response should hardly come as a surprise, after a week in which the EU Parliament gave Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ medieval blood libel a standing ovation. President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz, tweeted that the speech was “inspiring address by Pres. Abbas to EPlenary — EU supports aspiration by large majority of Palestinians for peace and reconciliation.”

Let that sink in for a moment: The president of the European Parliament thinks that a speech peddling medieval blood libels is “inspiring.” Furthermore, the “aspirations by large majority of Palestinians for peace and reconciliation” — where did he spot those aspirations? In the constant terrorist attacks? In the polls, which show that a majority of Palestinian Arabs support terror against Israelis? Or in the command of Abbas aide Sultan Abu al-Einein, a Fatah Central Committee official who said that “wherever you see a Jew, slit his throat”? Clearly, Palestinian Arabs pay very close heed to those words and act upon them promptly. But then again the EU never lets facts get in the way of its ideology.

As for the United States, the State Department issued their condolences to the family — no mention of the generous American funding of the PA, which enables all of this — but the White House, predictably, remained silent on the matter, despite the fact that the murdered girl carried American citizenship.

“The entire world needs to condemn this murder just as it condemned the terrorist attacks in Orlando and Brussels,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “I expect the Palestinian leadership to clearly, unequivocally condemn this vicious murder and take immediate action to stop the incitement. Enlightened nations must join in this demand and pressure the one who heads the incitement that leads to the murder of children in bed.”

Waiting for the world to condemn and pay lip service to Israel’s fight against terrorism is a dead end in every sense of the word. It will never happen. It did not happen on 9/11, when the world was most likely to understand what Israel was facing, and it will not happen 15 years later, when political correctness and a jaded sense that this is just the “new normal” has eroded any hopes that might have once been for genuine world solidarity with Israel. Israel must fight the terror as it sees fit in order to end it finally and prevent the killings of Jewish children in their sleep and pedestrians on their way to the supermarket.

We are a sovereign nation. We do not need the world’s permission to defend ourselves against those who seek our destruction.

By: Judith Bergman. This article was originally published by Israel Hayom.