Rabbeinu Bachya writes that Eisav is called a soneh of the Jewish People while Yishmael is an oiyev. The difference between the two is that the former can sometimes show mercy but not the latter. That cruelty unmitigated by any trace of human mercy was on ample display in Toulouse last week when Mohamed Merah yemach smemo a Muslim of Algerian descent chased eight-year-old Miriam Monsonego Hy”d through the courtyard of the Otzar HaTorah school grabbed her hair and calmly executed her gangland-style at point-blank range even after his first gun ran out of bullets and he had to switch to a second gun.
Early reports fromToulousesuggested that the murderer was a neo-Nazi. I hoped that would be the case. For if the killer were a neo-Nazi there would be no sympathy for the murderer no “explanations” of his savagery as a predictable response to harsh French laws against expressing support for Nazism. And the police would clamp down hard on neo-Nazi cells aroundFranceand hopefully be able to preventToulousefrom spawning many imitators.
And I suspect that most French hoped the same thing if only to allow them to maintain their denial of the magnitude of the threat faced fromEurope’s Muslim population. The Islamic motivation for atrocities committed by Muslims is consistently minimized by being put in the context of legitimate Muslim “grievances.”
The 2004 Madrid train bombings the 7/11 bombings of the London tube a year later and the 2005 French riots in the largely Muslim suburbs of Paris reveal that Europe is now home to millions of native-born Muslims who are ripe for radicalization. Tens of thousands of European-born Muslims have visited lands likeAfghanistanandPakistan where Islamists are rampant. European police cannot keep all of them under surveillance.
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