Regular readers already know what a vile person blogger Richard Silverstein is. After all, you don’t earn the moniker DouchebloggerTM helping little old ladies across the street. And sometimes it is easy to forget this since he actually looks like a little old lady you’d help across the street.
But he has reminded us just how beyond the pale he is, with this tweet only days after Yosef Salomon (70), Chaya Salomon (46) and Elad Salomon (36) were butchered in Halamish, located in Samaria (and thus considered a “settlement”)
Excerpt of the article to which he objects:
I still can’t quite believe I am writing this: I thought the ten commandments and the canons of other major creeds had covered it well enough. Thou Shalt Not Kill.
But it seems that I missed the memo from some quarters of leftist activism and pro-Palestinians social media actors (including from some of my fellow academics) that murdering settlers at Shabbat dinner is only…sort of…wrong.
As the initial logic of a larger camp of activists goes, Jewish-Israeli settlers are just soldiers of state expansion in Sabbath attire, carrying out ethnic cleansing even without the army uniform, destroying the dignity and potential sovereignty of the Palestinian people in plain sight, and so don’t need IDF camouflage attire. (There were even some echoes of these ideas in a recent Haaretz op-ed.)
For some, the farthermost reaches of this argument arrives at the point that a family of ten sitting down to a festive meal is fair game for slaughter. After all, today settlers are barely viewed as human beings to many on the left and blamed as the sole obstacle to peace in the occupied territories.
I never thought I would need to put this to paper but here it is: human rights aren’t only for the politically-correct people of the planet. The inalienable freedom not to be murdered in your kitchen as you sit down to dinner with your family applies to all. There is no moral or political justification for wanton slaughter. One’s political beliefs have no bearing on the fundamental entitlement to life and safety. Settlers, too, are human beings with human rights. [Full stop.]
I hope that Omar al-Abed, the Palestinian terrorist, will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law and that others in his community who may be inspired by these acts will know the crushing force of judicial and social recrimination.
Now for the inevitable accusation that I’ve drunk the settler Kool-Aid: Believing that all human beings – even those with controversial ideologies – deserve equal protection doesn’t mean one subscribes to ultra-nationalist politics. You are lying to yourself if you say you are a liberal but don’t actually think all peoples are deserving of the same dispensations; that the lives of Yosef, Chaya, and Elad Salomon are somehow less worthy than other lives in the West Bank.
Moreover, for those of us concerned about the human rights of Palestinians in the occupied territories, it is sheer hypocrisy to decry the death and disenfranchisement of a population under occupation on a daily basis, while turning a blind (even benevolent) eye to terrorists that would do the same to their neighbors in their own homes.
Silverstein is clearly taking issue with the idea that the Salomons and others living in Judea and Samaria deserve not to be slaughtered.
Or in other words: he thinks they deserved to be slaughtered.
I have meticulously documented most of Silverstein’s nastiness and moral bankruptcy over the years. But with this latest tweet, he has reached rock bottom.
And why am I bothering with him? Because he deserves to be shamed and made even more toxic to any news outlet than he already is.
