Sometimes I wonder if other people get mad when they read the news or if that’s just me. Take this piece by the Washington Post, entitled Jerusalem train line destined to connect Jews and Arabs has widened bitter divide, as if, yeah. It’s the train’s fault that Jews and Arabs aren’t best buds. As if it’s the train that makes Arabs so angry that HELL YEAH. They just have to vandalize public property. Oh, and kill Jews. Because Jews.
So why was I reading this piece in the first place? Because I decided that today’s surf of the news would include the Washington Post. Because it seemed less likely that I would encounter anti-Israel news bias there as compared to, for instance CNN or the New York Times (or Haaretz, for that matter).
The lede sucked me in and so I clicked over to the article from the homepage. I scanned the piece and came to the part where the authors summarized the light-rail stop attack by Abd al-Rahman al-Shaloudi in which 3 month-old infant Chaya Zissel Braun and 22 year-old Ecuadorian convert to Judaism, Yemima Mosquera were murdered.
Al-Shaloudi made a sudden sharp left turn in the middle of the street, doubled back the wrong way and aimed his car at the people standing at the light-rail train stop, awaiting the train. Security cameras captured the event on film for posterity. Watching the video, one can only conclude that the attack was absolutely deliberate. Al-Shaloudi meant to kill as many Jews as possible.
But the Washington Post doesn’t include the footage. Instead, the text editorializes and speaks of competing claims:
Israeli officials called it a terror attack.
Do you see how they did that? Instead of saying, “It was a terror attack” or “Al-Shaloudi purposely, and with malicious intent, ran his car into a crowd of Jews” the Washington Post says that Israel “calls” it a terror attack, calling into question whether or not it was in fact, a terror attack, which it was.
You only need to see the footage to know this.
The text continues:
The driver’s mother said her son must have lost control of his car.
Well, of course she said that. She’s his mother. She is the one who taught him how to tie his shoes and count (dead Jews?). Besides, it’s sorta kinda true. Al-Shaloudi saw a crowd of Jews and he lost it. His anger overtook him and he just had to run over a bunch of Jews.
So here’s the thing: evil, at its essence, is the act of releasing control over one’s inhibitions and subsequently giving in to base temptation. We are good until we lose our humanity. But it’s the kind of loss that’s a choice. Al-Shaloudi chose to lose his humanity. He chose to forget the difference between right and wrong and let that take him where it would.
He knew what he was doing—knew exactly what he was doing—when he rammed his car into a crowd of Jews. And had William Booth, Ruth Eglash, and Sufian Taha only watched the footage, they would have known that, too.
Judge for yourself:
