Imagine

In a post last week, I commented on the despicable BDS movement, a collection of unhinged leftists in the U.S. and Europe who do the bidding of palestinian terrorist groups like Hamas. Abraham Miller provides us with a commentary on a related issue:

In a poignant scene from the movie, A Time to Kill, the defense lawyer, played by Matthew McConaughey, describes in gruesome detail the brutal physical and sexual assault on a black child and then asks the jurors to close their eyes and imagine that child as white. Perhaps, it is time to apply such reverse imagery to the Palestinian-Israeli situation. Instead of Jewish children running to bomb shelters in Sderot, where the sculpted dragon in the playground is itself a bomb shelter, think of them as your children. Instead of Jewish victims of knife attacks in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, think of them as your children, your family, your friends, and your neighbors. And then, perhaps your perception of the horror of the situation will be closer to reality.

Better yet, how would the world react if it were Jews running around with knives, incited by their political and religious leaders to kill and maim innocent Palestinians? Instead of imams preaching death to the Jews, imagine rabbinic sermons calling for the killing of Muslims — all Muslims.

Imagine Israeli television using children to teach other children to kill Muslims. If that were the case, there would be international outrage of seismic proportions, emergency meetings of the United Nations, wholesale condemnation of everything Jewish, and a call for a UN force to patrol the streets of Jerusalem.

If planes hijacked by Jews had crashed into the World Trade Center, I would be writing this from behind barbed wire. Everything Jewish would fall under intense suspicion. Old blood libels would be resurrected and new ones fabricated. Elected officials would not be parsing something called “radical Judaism” as is now done with Islam. No administration — certainly not this one — would be redacting documents to avoid “Judaism” and “terrorism” appearing in the same paragraph, unlike the words “Islam” and “terrorism.”

There are, of course, different sets of rules for Israel as a country and Islam as an ideology. For Israel, the slightest misstep associated with defending themselves from brutal terror attacks is labeled a "war crime." The left-leaning main stream media follows the lead of an anti-Israel Obama administration and labels the construction of apartment building as a major provocation, even though the buildings are being built on Israeli land, The left labels lands won back in a war initiated by the losing party to be "occupied," conveniently forgetting that Jews lived on those "occupied" lands for millennia.

It seems that the left will do just about anything to protect Muslims from criticism, regardless of how gruesome the actions of radical Islamists or how egregious their cultural assault on otherwise protected groups (e.g., women, gay people, those of other religions). Launching rockets against civilian population centers in Israel or stabbing Jews on the street are simply labeled actions "born out of frustration," rather than barbaric acts that would be unacceptable if they came from any other group or people.

Currently, the Obama State Department flat out refuses to label the Muslim extermination of Christians throughout the Middle East a 'genocide.' Their refusal has become so egregious that the Knights of Columbus is running national TV ads demanding action. Attempts to label terrorist mass murder as "workplace violence" are common under Obama. When a pregnant mother of three was stabbed to death by a palestinian in Israel, the story got little play in the US.

Why is it, I wonder, that Muslims are a protected group? Why is it that in the wake of a terror attack by Muslims, the first reaction of leftist politicians is to warn against anti-Muslim reprisals, over and over again. This both insulting and unnecessary because there have been no widespread anti-Muslim attacks in the United States, even after 9/11 or the more recent San Bernadino attacks.

It would be nice to "imagine" world leaders who demand that Islam act to eradicate al Qaeda, ISIS and every other Islamist group in its midst; where anti-Semitic literature is removed from mosques and madrassas; where Christians are allowed to live in peace in lands they have inhabited for over a thousand years; where a reformation within Islam becomes a global movement. Too bad none of that will happen as long as the "world" doesn't hold Islam accountable for the actions of a non-trivial percentage of its adherents.