Today, the one year anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cache attacks, a Jihadist armed with a butcher’s knife and fake suicide vest (according to initial reports), was shot dead while shouting “Allahu Akabar” as he attempted to kill French police officers in Paris. After he was neutralized, the police found two pieces of paper on him, one with an image of the ISIS flag and another with a handwritten note in Arabic claiming responsibility for the attack.
This is a scene all too familiar to Israelis, however the international reaction to it, sadly, is not.
There have been no calls on the French government to exercise “restraint” in its reactions to this terror attack. Nor have there been calls for France to negotiate with ISIS or establish a radical Islamist state on French soil. There have been no foreign government officials condemning the Paris police for excessive force or carrying out an extrajudicial killing. The media also had no problem reporting that this was likely an act terrorism or that ISIS is in fact a terrorist organization.
The same is true of the reactions to the Islamist hatchet attack in Queens, NY in 2014, the car ramming attack in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec in the same year or of the car ramming and stabbing death of British Fusilier Lee Rigby in 2013 or any of the other numerous “low-level” terror attacks around the world recently.
So what is different between these attacks and those carried out daily in Israel today? The attackers in all cases have been radical Islamists. They all used low-tech weapons to carry out or attempt to carry out murders. Some have openly pledged allegiance to terrorist groups and others were inspired by them.
There are only three real differences:
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The location: Israel
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The target: Jews
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The frequency: Daily
There are numerous excuses for the double standards, but they don’t hold up to any serious scrutiny:
“But Israel is bombing the Palestinians!” Is France not bombing ISIS? “But they’re attacking soldiers!” Lee Rigby was a soldier and the victims in France today were police officers (not to mention that the vast majority of Israeli victims are civilians, not soldiers).
“But Palestinians don’t have a state of their own!” So we should give ISIS the Caliphate it wants? Would that stop the terror?
These are excuses that lack any moral clarity or understanding of the threat of radical Jihad.
The fact of the matter is that if you see two attacks, both carried out by radical Islamists, both attempts to stab someone to death but only consider it terrorism when the intended victim is not Jewish, well there’s a word for that kind of hypocrisy.
And that word is antisemitism.
