Palestinians murder Jewish family in their sleep

Sleeping in Samaria on Shabbat

Rick Richman 03.13.2011 - 6:55 AM
Daled Amos has a must-read post about the Palestinian Authority foreign minister’s initial response to the Shabbat stabbings of Udi Fogel (36), Ruth Fogel (35), and three of their five children (Yoav, 11; Elad, 4; and Hadas, 2 months) while they were sleeping in their home in Itamar in Samaria.
The foreign minister described the murders as “unprecedented.” The post includes pictures of the 123 Israeli children murdered by Palestinians since the offer of a state in 2000 (a total of about 1,200 Israelis have been murdered by terrorists since then). The Boker tov, Boulder! “trip down memory lane” is also worth reading.
The New York Times report seems to imply that the “proximity” of a settlement “overlooking” a Palestinian village caused a “visceral” response:
The killers appeared to have randomly picked the house, one of a neat row of identical one-story homes at the edge of the settlement, on a rocky incline overlooking the nearby Palestinian village of Awarta — the proximity underlining the visceral nature of the contest in this area between Jewish settlers and Palestinians over the land.
The report is datelined Itamar but included no picture of the community; a picture might have been useful to readers seeking to evaluate the implicit suggestion that 150 Jewish families living in an area with biblical significance was a provocation.
The headline of the Times report is “Suspecting Palestinians, Israeli Military Hunts for Killers of 5 West Bank Settlers.” Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren released a statement expressing his “profound disappointment with … the NY Times, which describes the victims, including a two month old baby, as ‘settlers,’ thereby dehumanizing them.” In my view, the report did something even worse.