Just to add to Jonah’s observation on Reuters below, Louise Bagshawe, the chick-lit author and Conservative MP, wrote a piece for the London Telegraph wondering why she hadn’t heard about the Fogel murders until she read my Corner post “Dead Jews is no news.” Where, she asks, is the BBC coverage?

As I said in my post, there are circles of depravity: The relatively small number of people willing to decapitate a baby; the larger number of Palestinians happy to celebrate the decapitation of a baby; and the massed ranks of Western media anxious to obscure the truth about the nature of the event. The comments below Miss Bagshawe’s column provide a glimpse of a fourth circle — the large numbers of Westerners who, even when confronted with the reality of what happened, are nevertheless eager to rationalize it as a legitimate response to a legitimate grievance.

For all the frictions between the aging, fading natives of Europe and their young, assertive Muslim populations, on this one issue at least there is remarkable comity.

1. Mahmoud Abbas’s elected term ended in January 2009, and there weren’t additional elections. The guy just seems to be staying in power by his own fiat, even though the most powerful faction in half of his country (Hamas) does not acknowledge his legitimacy. Yet here he is, trompsing about as though he were the legitimate leader of his people. This is the sort of thing that caused me to stop reading about “the Middle East” – the degeneracy of one side is so complete that I would prefer to simply ignore them.

2. In a news story I missed in February, Abbas visited Hiroshima.

Mr. Abbas wrote in the museum guest book: “My heart is aching for the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” He then said to the press: “People in Palestine have also been afflicted by war. War causes destruction of humans and civilizations. . . “

I cannot think of anything that would cast the Palestinians in a less favorable light than to compare them to the Japanese. As much as Abbas and other Palestinians like to wallow in their own misery, it simply pales in comparison to what the Japanese, and specifically the residents of Hiroshima went through. For years during the war, the Japanese underwent starvation, the mass deaths of loved ones fighting in foreign campaigns, and American bombers destroying entire cities and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

And as though these apocalyptic events were not enough, America went and invented a theretofore inconceivable weapon that would in an instant annihilate 90% of Hiroshima and leave the wretched who survived afflicted with burns, radiation sickness, and cancer. Abbas can say what he wants about Hiroshima, and Hiroshima’s civic leaders are generally whiny enough that they soak up that sort of crap, but in no actual sense do Palestinians have a clue what Hiroshima went through.

Where the comparison gets unflattering is what Hiroshima, and Japan, did after the bombing. By combining hard work with what is, to me, an unfathomable ability to put the past behind them, the Japanese rose from their own ashes as the greatest industrial power in Asia, and second only to America worldwide. Hiroshima itself became a bustling metropolis of three times its pre-war size, the fifth wealthiest city in Japan (warning: PDF). The Japanese today are a free and prosperous people, lovers of baseball, allies with their former enemies, and friends of liberty worldwide. It is a story that cannot be told enough, and never ceases to amaze.

The Palestinians, on the other hand, still have refugee camps from a war that ended over 60 years ago, just three years after Japan’s war ended. Their level of economic development can best be characterized as “miserable,” and it’s only that good because of massive amount of foreign aid, constituting about 1/3 of the Palestinian economy. They have refused to move on from their lost war, continue to [futilely] fight the nation that defeated them, and have developed a national persona that revolves around their status as supposed victims.

Even if you look at 1967 as the date the Palestinians lost their war, the comparison is unfavorable. 43 years after the annihilation of Hiroshima, 1988, there were concerns throughout the Western world that the Japanese were going to overtake us, outproduce us, and buy us out, and that “the Japanese way” was, simply, superior to the Western way. Today, 43 years after the end of the 1967 war, the Palestinians have a self-appointed leader for life whose main purpose is to tell foreign audiences how miserable the Palestinians are.

We’d all be better off if Mr. Abbas had spent more time in Hiroshima and absorbed some of its atomic sunshine.

Israel is neither a hapless victim nor a blushing maiden, but it’s a decent and productive country that wishes little but the saftey and liberty of its citizens.  In contrast, the Palestinians have produced a loathsome, hate-filled, kleptocratic society that brainwashes children and glorifies the worst kind of violence.  They deserve neither our sympathy nor our support.

Of course, this is, remarkably, a campaign pledge that he backtracked on during the campaign, so I guess he’s not breaking his word now. One would hope that the few remaining pro-Israel Democrats would see what their party really thinks of Israel and leave it. But they’ve been continent in being tools for this long, so I don’t suppose this will be enough to open their eyes.

Israel is an independent country, the ravings of some American anti-semites notwithstanding. The Israelis will do as they please, and if we do not help provide them with security, they will find security through their own means. That is, taunting Israel like this achieves absolutely nothing aside from making an Israeli strike against Iran more probable.

Peace is possible only when people feel secure. When you remove security, when you present Israel with the prospect that we will stand by as Iran prepares the weapons needed to destroy Israel, you risk war.

What, then, are the children of Palestine learning when the youth orchestra is disbanded for playing to Shoah survivors?  [Emphasis added below.]

Palestinian authorities disbanded a youth orchestra from a West Bank refugee camp after it played for a group of Holocaust survivors in Israel, a local official said on Sunday.

Adnan Hindi of the Jenin camp called the Holocaust a political issue and accused conductor Wafa Younis of unknowingly dragging the children into a political dispute.

He added that Younis has been barred from the camp and the apartment where she taught the 13-member Strings of Freedom orchestra has been boarded up.

“She exploited the children,” said Hindi, the head of the camp’s popular committee, which takes on municipal duties. “She will be forbidden from doing any activities…. We have to protect our children and our community.”

(H/T)

When learning history and music and paying tribute to survivors takes second place to propaganda, there’s no real hope for the future.  Is there an Arabic word for doublespeak—how does preventing an orchestra from playing “protect our children”?

By the way, $900 million from U.S. taxpayers.

And Hitchens has particularly lost it when discussing Sarah Palin:

And it must be easy for a woman who couldn’t, when first asked, name a single newspaper or magazine that she had ever read…

The subtle distinction between “couldn’t” and “wouldn’t” isn’t one that Hitchens would normally miss, and one he particularly should not ignore in a column defending a man who defended terrorists. I wouldn’t complain about the “low blows” of others if, in the same column, I dishonestly painted the most popular governor in America as illiterate.

Assud: Who will host this show if you are martyred? Will 100,000 Saraas take your place?

Saraa: Allah willing, Assud.

Assud: We’ll take them from among the Pioneers of Tomorrow, Allah willing.

Saraa: Allah willing, there are thousands of soldiers of the Pioneers of Tomorrow.

Assud: Martyrdom for the sake of Allah is what we hope for, right?

Saraa: Right, Assud.

[snip]

Saraa: What do you have to say to the cartoonist who started all this and affronted the Prophet by drawing him?

Assud: He’s a criminal…

Saraa: Yes, a criminal.

[Tasnim, a caller to the show]: I say to him, and to all of them, that no matter how much they try to hide him, we will manage to kill him, to assassinate him.

Assud: Allah willing.

Saraa: I pray that Allah makes the earth swallow him up, so that he serves as a lesson to others like him, Tasnim.

As Geoff has said, what’s amazing about this show is that it manages to be fantastically evil while being fantastically lame at the same time. I mean, wow.