Anti-Israel Crowd Chortles Over Israeli Kids’ Kidnapping

I suppose that it’s to be expected but the usual suspects are not exactly heartbroken over the kidnapping of the three Israeli kids. To be honest, the only anti-Israel sites I go to check out the temperature are Mondoweiss (the blog) and two twitter accounts, the Palestinian activist Ali Abunimah (@aliabunimah) and his Jewish sidekick Max Blumenthal (@maxblumenthal).

Usually the writers at all three are pretty much the same: venomous on Israel and often Jews in general (otherwise known as “Zionists”).

In this case, Mondoweiss (in particular its writer/editor Annie Robbins) and twitter guy Ali Abunimah basically take the approach that the kids are just “settlers” (the term they use rather than say “kids” or “teens”). And, given the way Israel treats Palestinians, the kidnapping (Annie Robbins doubts it even is that) is just a case of chickens coming home to roost.

Max Blumenthal, a Jewish teen not long ago, clearly has some sympathy for his fellow…humans. Not the others. (I am not going to quote from any of these miscreants. If you want to see what I am referring to, check out Mondoweiss, always the best source to see what the supposed anti-Zionists are writing about Jews.

In my opinion, the very best indicator of the humanity (or lack thereof) of anyone is their attitude toward violence against children. Jews who justify the killing of kids in Gaza (“it’s all Hamas’s fault”) or try to prove that some child, obviously killed by the IDF, was killed by Palestinians, make me sick. Almost literally sick.

And I have written it over and over again. There is no justification for harming kids no matter what the cause. Never.

Extreme right-wing Jews often don’t feel that way. Even when the IDF killed three little girls sleeping in their beds in Gaza, the rightists came up with excuses and certainly no tears. But that is the far right. It doesn’t even pretend to value human life over, depending where they live, occupation or the right to bring a gun to McDonald’s.

Mondoweiss and those of that ilk claim to be progressive, anti-war, lovers of children and all living things–only not when it comes to Israeli kids who are just “settlers” or, in Abunimah’s term, “Zionist invaders.” Just as Jewish right-wingers refuse to see Palestinian kids as innocent (as if they chose to live in an area administered by Hamas or even to have parents affiliated with it), the Mondoleft refuses to view teenagers as innocent even though they obviously did not choose to live in Hebron or anywhere else.

This is what the haters don’t get: children do not have agency. They live where their parents put them. (One Mondoweiss writer is interested in the curriculum the kids were studying at yeshiva, as if a hateful curriculum would mean the kids aren’t innocent at all, just like Palestinian kids with their hateful textbooks.)

Here is the thing, the only thing that matters. Anyone who reacts to the harming of any child with anything other than sorrow, pain, and empathy is lost.

The Jewish right, the “anti-Zionist” left, no matter. The test of your humanity is whether you can condemn the harming of children without caveats and quasi-justifications. If not, just shut up. Your silence will say enough.