focal point

Anyone who doubts that hatred of all things Jewish is already institutionalized in certain organizations within the United States need only listen to National Public Radio’s brazenly antagonistic coverage of Israel: as if even the most depraved acts of the most viciously fanatical Islamic terrorists are thoroughly justified by the mere existence of the Jewish homeland state. This is one of the main reasons I stopped listening to NPR long ago – its bigotry, formerly subtle, had become as blatant as a Ku Klux Klan rally.

Occasionally while I was still listening to NPR I wondered if perhaps I was hearing something akin to the hateful propaganda with which the German people were deluged in the years just before Hitler’s electoral triumph. During the period in question, the late 1920s through the middle 1930s, the Germans were the best educated, most literate people on earth: one study I remember from my long-ago undergraduate days stated that in the years of Hitler's ascent, Germans also had the planet’s highest-per-capita numbers of houses wired for electricity and therefore the greatest per-capita numbers of telephones and radios. Of course the Germans also suffered from genuinely ruinous inflation – something the obscene spiral of petroleum prices is bound to inflict on the United States -- but even allowing for the climate of fear and rage such inflation inevitably produces, the fact that an electorate so well educated and so materially modern so enthusiastically embraced Adolf Hitler and his “final solution” surely puts the lie to all the bleeding-heart theories that tyranny is bred of poverty, deprivation and ignorance. Moreover, “embrace” is precisely the correct verb, for the man known as Der Fuhrer had spelled out in graphic detail on the pages of Mein Kampf his intent to exterminate the Jews – just as the Arafats and imams with whom NPR is so toxically smitten make no secret of their genocidal intentions today.

Precisely because I do not listen to NPR, I missed NPR reporter Julie McCarthy’s denunciation of a murdered Israeli mother and her five murdered children for “provoking” their own slayings merely by their presence in Gaza. Though the world already knows of the atrocity itself, it is entirely proper to repeat the names of its victims: the roll-call of the dead is one of the ways my Scots ancestors invoked the divine curse of vengeance on their enemies. The murdered mother’s name was Tali Hatuel, and she bore in her womb a son, who was slain but 30 days from his birth. Knowing expectant parents – having been one once myself – I don’t doubt the son had already been named too, but apparently today’s journalists are such craven cowards, no one possessed enough courage to defy pro-abortion censorship and ask what that dead boy’s name might have been. The other four murdered children were Tali’s daughters, ages 11, 9, 7 and 2 respectively; their names were Hila, Hadar, Roni and Meirav. The two Islamic “heroes” (the title with which the Palestinian terror organizations have already canonized the slayers) disabled the mother with a burst of gunfire and gleefully shot each of her children in the face while the children were still conscious and screaming in terror. Finally one of the two killers pressed the muzzle of his 9mm pistol against Tali’s infant-swollen belly and fired three times to destroy the precious life within. Then the two terrorists fled but were promptly wasted by Israeli riflemen – unfortunately clean quick ends for gloating sadists who deserved to be gut-shot and left on some desert anthill in ever worsening agony to contemplate the slow approach of their own extinction.

Probably if I had heard Julie McCarthy say what she said about Tali Hatuel and her five children, I would have picked up my radio and hurled it across the room and my blood pressure would have surged somewhere past the 200-psi mark and maybe some blood vessel somewhere in my skull or chest cavity would have blown and I would now be one of the staffers pounding a phantom Royal Standard in the great newsroom in the sky, so I am once again glad I stopped listening to NPR years ago. But Jeff Jacoby of the The Boston Globe did not stop listening to NPR and he heard everything McCarthy said, and this is part of what Jacoby said in response: “In NPR's warped moral calculus, Tali Hatuel and her children are in early graves not because Palestinian culture celebrates the mass murder of Jews but because Jews have no business living among Arabs. If McCarthy had been reporting from Birmingham in September 1963, would she have blamed the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on the provocative ‘presence’ of the four black girls who died in the explosion?" The rest of Jacoby’s remarks are just as worth reading and are available here.

But whether you read this Jacoby piece or not, here is the thing to bear in mind: Israel’s war and our war is the same war – the defense of liberty and civilization against Islam’s 1300-year onslaught. The men who murdered Tali Hatuel and murdered her daughters Hila, Hadar, Roni and Meirav, and murdered Tali’s unborn son whose name no reporter was brave enough to ask – these killers are the very same savages we are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. If we do not win this war in those places, we will eventually be fighting it here at home, and the doom of Tali Hatuel and her children will be the fate of our very own kin.

posted by on May 6, 2004 01:47 PM