As you sow, so shall you reap

A non-murderous overlord is useful for two reasons: He keeps your own baser impulses battened down, and he provides a lightening rod for those same impulses. Take the overlord away, and those same tamped down impulses explode — against you and yours. Case in point? Gaza, sans Israel:

Palestinian factions have moved closer to civil war after masked gunmen shot dead the three young sons [ed. — 9, 6 and 3, respectively] of a senior Fatah intelligence officer as they were being driven to school.

Coming a day after the Hamas interior minister survived an assassination attempt, the killings are expected to prompt more tit-for-tat violence between the two main Palestinian factions.

While Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah leader and president of the Palestinian national authority, condemned the attack on Baha Balousha’s children as “ugly and inhuman”, local authorities appeared powerless to stop further bloodshed.

Across Gaza and the West Bank there was a strong sense of shock at the killings. While local politicians and military commanders often face assassination, the deliberate targeting of children is unprecedented.

There’s more, but I stopped where I did because I was struck by that last paragraph, which struck me as much too naive for a presumably seasoned Middle Eastern reporter to have written. Ah, the shock that Palestinians would kill Palestinian children! In fact, a paragraph such as that speaks of so many slippery slopes, each one of which the Palestinians have traveled down, only to find themselves now wallowing in the filthy muck at the bottom.

For one thing, Palestinians have gleefully targeted kids when those kids were Jewish. Already back in 1970, the Palestinians carried out the heinous Avivim school bus massacre, where they deliberated targeted children and succeeded in murdering 12 people, most of them those same children. Or how about the equally horrifying Ma’alot school massacre, where armed Palestinians “bravely” stormed a school filled with a hundred unarmed teenagers? Twenty-one students died. The Palestinians didn’t always think in such grand terms, of course. Sometimes it was just one on one, with an armed man bashing a four year old’s head against a rock before crushing her head with a rifle — but only after first making sure she saw her father shot to death.

Ah, that’s just the Jews, you might say. But the Palestinians have been using their own children as cannon fodder in increasing numbers too. Charles, at LGF, has a running series of posts called “Palestinian child abuse” showing Palestinians boastfully show their children armed (with rocks, real guns or toy guns) and placed deliberately in the line of fire. Additionally, the terror masters recruit younger and younger “youths” to carry into Israel those bombs that are aimed at killing Jewish civilians, especially Jewish children. Why, then, should the Palestinians now express surprise that, without Jews to target, they turn on their own children and slaughter them?

It’s tragic that those three young children died. It’s not a surprise, though. It’s the inevitable result of a society that has devoted itself to murdering children, and that has, with ever increasing frequency, used its own children to carry out the job.

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