When Body Bags of Children Are Loaded On To Ambulances

A few hours before the June 11th Arab terror attack which blew up a civilian bus in downtown Jerusalem, five minutes from my office window, the Islamic Movement of Israel called a press conference down the hall at the press center to demand the release of their leaders who have been arrested for the support that they provide the Islamic movement that operates inside the nascent Palestinian Authority.

When I asked these Islamic clerics as to how they could justify support for a movement that endorses cold blooded murder, they shrugged off the question, as if such a question should not be asked.

As a journalist, I have met and interviewed countless Palestinian Arab spokespeople who calmly recount their right to murder Jews for committing the act of living in land of Israel, which the Arab world describes as Palestine.

One of the Palestinian Arab spokespeople whom I have interviewed is Dr. Abdel Rantisi. Although Rantisi is a medical doctor, he calmly invokes a doctrine of the right to murder Jews. In Dr Rantisi’s understanding of Islamic law, Jews have no right to encroach upon what he calls the Islamic “wakf: (religious trust) of Palestine and therefore deserves to die. So much for the Hippocatic Oath.

When the IDF made an attempt to kill Dr. Rantisi on June 9th, 2003, following the latest round of murders which Dr. Rantisi had endorsed to the world media, the President of the United States, Mr George W. Bush immediately condemned the attack. The Washington Post of June 10th chimed in, claiming that “Dr. Rantisi is not himself a combatant.” He “represents a movement that engages in terrorism,” the Post said,, “but his specialty is media interviews, not suicide bombings.”

What Bush, the Washington Post and other critics of the IDF attack on Dr. Rantisi’s life ignore is that Dr Rantisi remains the penultimate combatant- especially whenever he calls for the murder of Jews, in every part of the land of Israel, on both sides of the 1949/67 lines.

What Israel’s critics tend to forget is that the “raison d’etre” of the State of Israel is that this is the first time in 1900 years when Jews can fight back when their enemies openly advocate their murder.

Throughout the centuries, Jews took it on the chin and suffered persecution through generations in a defenseless exile, which culminated in the mass murder of six million Jews in twenty one nations during World War II.

Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel affords Jews the opportunity to bear weapons against anyone who declares war against the people and state of Israel. No nation can be expected to forfeit the right to fight such an adversary.

The Jewish people have often referred to as the people of the Book. That Book is the Bible.

And in the Bible you find the Book of Ecclesiastes, where we read that “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven… A time to be born, and a time to die…A time to kill, and a time to heal… a time of war, and a time of peace.

If a nation proposes peace, this is “a time of peace”.

If a nation declares war, this is a “time of war”.

As I witnessed body bags of small children loaded onto ambulances in the aftermath of the June 11th bus bombing in Jerusalem, it was not hard to conclude that this is a “time to kill”.

Israel indeed reserves the right to kill Rantisi and any other adversary who would dispatch such messengers to wantonly murder Jews

No nation can remove that right – Road maps not withstanding.