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| Hussein Dawabshe and his surviving grandson (mondoweiss) |
Earlier today, an Israeli court held a hearing in the case of two Jewish suspects accused of firebombing the home of a Palestinian family in 2015, killing 18-month-old Ali Saad Dawabsha and his parents, Riham and Saad. According to a report in The Times of Israel, as the victims’ relatives walked into the courthouse, a gaggle of about two dozen Jewish protestors started taunting them, chanting “Where’s Ali? There’s no more Ali. Ali was burned. Ali’s on the grill.”
There are no words to describe the level of contempt I have for these people. As Tablet notes, it doesn’t matter
whether suspects in this case are guilty of doing that or not. Nor does it matter that their confessions may have been made by virtue of being tortured by the Shin Bet - Israel’s
version of the FBI. Those are completely separate issues regardless of how one
feels about them. What these ‘animals’ did had nothing to do with their guilt
or innocence. In fact calling them
animals is insulting to animals!
What they showed was a celebration of cruelty and inhumanity
rivaling those that celebrated the cruelty and inhumanity of the Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
That anyone calling themselves human, let alone a Jew, could celebrate the burning
alive of an innocent 18 month old baby and his parents – while severely burning
his older brother who survived - is a new low.
I have no sympathy for the extreme right wing religious Zionist settler types. They have disgusted me for some time now. It is people from their ranks that have been terrorizing innocent Palestinians – and even
their own government when they objected to a policy they didn’t like - in what
they call ‘price tag’ attacks.
These people might think their attitudes and actions are
justified because vile acts like this have been done to Jews in far greater number
by Arab terrorists. But that is no justification at all. It is pure unadulterated
murder of innocent people in a cruel and
irrational act of revenge. You don’t kill their innocent people in retaliation
for their killing our innocent people.
That is not justice. Celebrating it is
vile – especially at the expense of the bereaved who like the victims of that
fire have done nothing wrong. Had it
been vigilante justice where taking the law into your own hands is at least
done to those who have harmed you or a loved one it might have been
understandable – wrong though it would be. But they were celebrating the kind of pure
evil reminiscent of 1930s Nazi Germany.
What happened at that courthouse deserves to be condemned in
the strongest possible terms by anyone calling themselves a human being. There
is no justifying it in any way. There can be no ‘understanding what they’ve
gone through’. There can be no ‘they have been brought to desperation by what
has been done to them’. There can only be disgust!.
As far as I am concerned, people like this ought to be
completely ostracized – virtually exiled from the Jewish world in its entirety.
They should be treated with contempt wherever they go - made unwelcome and
asked to leave when they enter any facility where actual human beings are present.
They want to act like animals? Fine. Let them go out in the forests and live
with them. Because they are unfit to live with actual human beings.
