How Could Gun Control Lower Gun Violence?

 

This has been a basic question where conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, gun owners and advocates against gun control advocates have wrestled and neither side has ever found the magic, pardon our word usage, silver bullet to end the violence resulting from criminal firearm usage. Every time there is a dramatic milestone reached as was recently in Chicago where they reached five-hundredth homicide of the year or a dramatic firearms related death toll resulting from firearms usage such as the Orlando club shooting or the string of homicides in San Bernardino for the anti-gun forces to rush to blame the guns even if the real culprit was terrorism as in Orlando and San Bernardino. There is the demand for long waiting periods, deeper background checks, limits on firearm purchases per person per year or any of a number from a plethora of inventive laws which would presumably end criminal purchases of firearms at gun shows, gun stores, private sales or other legal forms of firearms purchases. This begs a simple question, how many criminals are purchasing their firearms legally. Yes, there have been some tragic cases where a person legally purchased the firearms they use all too often in violent mass shootings such as too many school shootings or mass public shootings such as in movie theaters or nightclubs or as vengeance workplace violence or even terrorism. These tragic cases often are the first criminal act of the shooters and they went through all of the existing checks and even if further checks and wait periods were enacted they would have had little if any effect beyond waiting periods causing them to plan longer and delay their shooting sprees but not preventing them. Still, over ninety percent of shootings are committed by people with criminal records who already would be unable to walk into a gun show or gun store and purchase a firearm legally and most of the firearms used in these crimes are often stolen weapons which were bought illegally from nonstandard sources which operate beyond the law. The idea that making legal firearm purchases more time consuming, burdensome and legally tangled with more and more layers of paperwork and legal hurdles does nothing to prevent criminal firearm purchases and the politicians know this and the crime data records prove this. So why if these facts are well known and understood do the politicians continue to call for restrictions on firearm purchases and even have many calling now for the repeal of the Second Amendment and the complete ban of legal firearm ownership despite all evidence pointing to this leading to increased firearm use by criminal elements as they then are assured they will be the only people armed in any criminal incident.

 

There are at least two easily understandable reasons for the politicians calling for more restrictive laws. The most obvious is their receiving funds for making such demands coming from the anti-gun lobbies who will love such legislation and will spend liberally supporting political campaigns for those supportive candidates. Another reason is the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) who also favor more firearm laws as each law, regulation and licensing required by law increases the numbers of government employees required to process and handle the additional forms, research, background checks, license issuing or renewal and any other directives and requirements such legislation demands. These are two of the most active groups a candidate can get behind them in order to finance their campaign. The other reason which looms over the gun debate even more than campaign finances is the general lack of real information and education of the public, especially in most major metropolitan jurisdictions. This is largely due to the complete lack of intimate knowledge, education, training or even the slightest use of a firearm by the majority of the voting public. With a smaller and smaller percentage of the population having served in the military, especially suburban residents, and even less training in firearms in such organization as the Boy Scouts and other youth groups and there no longer having any firearms training in summer camps, the public is generally unfamiliar with firearms and many even developing a symptom bordering on maniacal fear of firearms to the point of hyperventilating at the sight of a gun other than on the belt of a uniformed police officer. Additionally, the use of firearms in entertainment venues such as movies displaying firearms in ways which are wildly inaccurate such as handguns or rifles firing well over one-hundred rounds without ceasing fire for reloading even firing six-shot revolvers twenty or thirty times before changing to another weapon or reloading, has fueled misconceptions of the lethality and practical use of firearms which if applied to swords would have the sword being capable of killing merely by removing it from its scabbard. Another misconception furthered by the entertainment industry is the range at which weapons, particularly handguns, are lethal. With shots being taken with a 9mm or a 45cal semi-automatic handgun at well over a quarter mile, 440 yards or four and a half football fields (pitch) which is a highly dubious range even for a really good marksman, but that is the short end of impossible shots as many a movie aficionado can attest. I have actually seen neighbors shrink away when friends and I would return from the outdoor public range and transport normal handguns and a few hunting rifles from the trunk of the vehicle into the house for cleaning and once had an extremely paranoid neighbor call the police claiming that terrorists were meeting in my place with dozens of guns and other weapons. The police were not all that amused but as two of my friends had Federal Firearms Licenses and one had a Class III Weapons Permit and worked at a gun store, they were forced to allow us to retain our weapons. The neighbor was frantic that we were not taken away in chains and the arsenal confiscated. Ah, reliving the good old days of my misspent youth.

 

Dianna Rigg as Emma Peel in The Avengers

 

The truth is that should the anti-gun and anti-weapons fanatics get their way, we will be eating steaks with butter knives if the vegans allow us to continue to eat slabs of cows. This claim is made as there have been calls in the United Kingdom, or at least in London and other cities of the Isles to make knives beyond six inches illegal which would make a number of carving knives and my bread knife illegal and some steak knives I have seen such as the ones at a restaurant in the United States and likely elsewhere called Outback. By our figuring, if these fanatics against weapons of all venues got their way, we would no longer have forks and instead be using sporks with our butter knives. The people who wish to make life so guarded that even the roads are made soft enough that falling will not scrape an elbow or a knee really have lost all sense of excitement and see danger not as a challenge to be overcome but a peril which must be eradicated so even the most inept cannot harm themselves no matter how recklessly they address life’s challenges. Where if they desire to round every corner in their homes and pad every piece of furniture while only using safe utensils such as butter knives and sporks and eat only the most bland fruits and vegetables rushing to the doctor’s office at the first sneeze or cough, let them live such lives but do not force your phobias on the remainder of us who wish to live lives dangerously using real forks and steak knives just to eat an apple because we love the thrill of the hunt. Truth be told, the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution was argued in the Federalist Papers as being the last line of defense against and to prevent Government Overreach and assure the Constitutional limits on Government power was in the hands of the people.

 

Safe Knife and Spork of the Future

 

These people who claim that the gun is evil are carrying paranoia to an extreme beyond reason. I am willing to bet any of these people that a fully loaded handgun of any caliber could be placed on my kitchen table and sit there in the open for a full year and nobody I know would pick it up or fear it and it is highly unlikely, to the point of absurdness, that it would ever injure, let alone murder, anybody during that year or any number of additional years. I am willing to bet that they could not produce one person who robbed a convenience store who was claiming the firearm walked up to them, grabbed them by the hand and dragged them to the convenience store forcing them to rob it. Yet these same people would claim it was the gun if that same person had shot the clerk and simply wounded him requiring three stitches and a band aid. The tired old phrase that it is the person who commits the crime and not the firearm is true but there are those who insist on believing otherwise. They will claim that had the criminal not had the gun they would not have committed the crime. Somehow we believe it is more likely that the criminal would easily be able to buy a gun from, wait for it, another criminal if they were without a gun and believed one was needed to commit their crime. They would not go to Joe’s Gun Emporium or the county fair gun pavilion or any other legal means, they would go to a well-known criminal world individual and purchase a gun and for a few dollars more a gun without any serial number as it had been removed. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the criminal world will sell you guns made to order for the right price. It probably comes as a shock to the gun control supporters that there exist individuals who actually sell guns illegally and if they desire making it more difficult for criminal elements to use firearms, then the people they need to prevent from selling guns are the criminal elements and not the local gun store. Are there those gun store people who might sell guns under the table? Probably, but they are a rare minority and eventually they will be caught which every gun owner will be glad and hopes such a person is put away for a very long time. Gun owners are responsible citizens and are just as abhorred at criminal gun use as the next person, even the anti-gun lobbyist. Nothing would make gun owners happier than for every gun to be legally owned and never used for a criminal purpose and for not another person to die from gun violence. As far as gun accidental deaths, when you can figure out how to end the fifty-thousand plus vehicle deaths each year on the American highways and streets, then we can worry about the few hundred accidental gun deaths. It is nice to keep things in perspective and every gun death is a tragedy as is every premature death. But please let us remain sane and address the more serious causes of accidental deaths such as swimming pools and bathtubs, honestly folks.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Philippine President Duterte Against the World

 

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte took office on June 30, 2016, elected partially on his promise to bring an end to the drug trade which was destroying his nation and the people’s nation. He has gone directly to work on this promise but now is facing threats from the United Nations as well as the United States State Department. Just yesterday we were giving the United States Department of State credit and now we face the great let down as they join the United Nations Human Rights experts all of whom are denigrating the efforts of President Duterte in freeing his people from the ravages of the illegal drug trade. His efforts to clean the Philippines of this scourge has run into a difficulty which the United Nations Human Rights experts and United States Department of State as they protest the deaths of five-hundred drug suspects have who have been killed in gun battles with police. If this number shocks you, then we might ask a simple question. What part of the statement distresses one? Is it the fact that gun battles have broken out between suspected drug criminals? Is it that these suspected drug traffickers were killed extra-judicially without being found guilty by a trial in a court of law? Was it the number of drug suspects killed is so high at five-hundred? Was it something we may have missed in our quick summary? Perhaps we should slow down in the rush to judgement and place this number into perspective of the accomplishments Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in his eight weeks in office first and then discuss these introduction statements in context.

 

Yes, five-hundred were killed in gun battles in eight weeks, a total of nine suspected drug criminals each day. We agree that such is a bit shocking but what is even more shocking are the success numbers of efforts thus far which place all in sharp contrast. Thus far over four-thousand-four-hundred drug suspects have been arrested and are awaiting trial. That is a large number of arrests and that is not even the slightest bit of the success. Between those arrested and those who chose to resist arrest and died in violent gun battles approach five-thousand drug suspects out of action, that is nothing compared to this final statistic. There have been an astonishing almost six-hundred-thousand drug suspects and related operatives who have turned themselves over to authorities simply surrendering. This astounding and likely unexpected success has resulted in overcrowding in Philippine jails which were never expected to hold such numbers. We believe that Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte will find some alternative by which these suspects will be housed at military bases or other emergency facilities and many will likely be processed, then charged, followed by some very reasonable bails being set and the least offenders freed on their own recognizance and told they will be notified of their court date which they will be expected to present themselves or face additional and likely more serious charges of disobeying the courts. Meanwhile, after taking in the scope of the problem, is there any doubt that those who decided their odds were better in a shoot-out than a trial were actually the most guilty and the highest ranking drug lords and their security forces, the central core of what was obviously an enormous problem in the Philippines which President Duterte has delivered on a dangerous and difficult promise and done so spectacularly.

 

The one important and further ramification of the United Nations and United States State Department charges of human rights abuses and extra-judicial executions prompting threats to charge President Duterte with crimes against humanity and potentially genocidal practices are as ridiculous and they are familiar to us here. President Duterte had gone after and looking like having cleaned-up some dangerous and hard-core criminal enterprises which likely were costing the Philippine population numerous lives and making for a society where lawlessness was posing a threat and difficulty for those desiring to live in peace and security. Such a drug problem had to result in challenges to the authority of the government and pose serious threats to the Philippine citizens, especially those trying to be law abiding. Further, such a criminal enterprise must have been a huge drain on the economy and further made life difficult for the average law abiding citizens with lives threatened by such lawlessness in a similar manner as faced in Israel from terrorism and President Duterte and his government was threatened with the exact same threats as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli governance is threatened with as Israel fights terrorism. Even spookier was that the charges emanated from the United Nations human rights experts and the United States Department of State, the identical entities which make Israelis fighting terrorism appear to be a criminal enterprise against innocent terrorists just as the Philippine fight was criminalized as they brought innocent drug lords to justice.

 

The difference was the reaction from the Philippine President when compared to the passive and almost acquiescing apologetic Israeli reactions. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte took on his detractors from the United States and United Nations head-on and bluntly called them out. He challenged the United States on their fatal and very public shootings of black men in the recent past challenging to know how what he was doing was any different than these shootings by the police in the cities of the United States. He also brought up the viral picture of the five-year-old Syrian boy, Omran Daqneesh, which has gone viral online (see montage below). He stressed the lack of any progress and the lack of evidence that the people of Syria were being relieved of the heavy toll from the civil conflicts encompassing every corner and area of Syria where numerous disparate groups are warring each against the others with there being at least four distinct groups, Russia, Bashar Assad, Hezballah, Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps, Sunni Fighters, Islamic State and the Kurdish Militias for starters plus who knows who else. The big threat was that perhaps the Philippines would be better served separating from the United Nations as their efforts in Syria, Darfur, Libya and formerly in Rwanda, Central African Republic and the myriad of other trouble spots past and present which the United Nations had proved less than effective and in many cases where United Nations troops caused more problems than they relieved including running food for sex scandals in numerous places and their inability to enforce any order and being basically nonfunctional. President Duterte challenged the United Nations threatening to set up a group of nations initially with suggesting China and African nations to form a new international body. Perhaps Israel should assist with the formation of an actual international group of like-minded nations as a replacement for the United Nations though simply making agreements with select nations on a one-by-one nature and forge alliances more directly.

 

Five Year Old Syrian Omran Daqneesh
sitting in Ambulance in Aleppo Syria
After Being Pulled from Beneath Rubble of
Collapsed Building from Bombing Attack

 

Those who have followed or had direct experience with the United Nations and/or the United States State Department realize how much these sanctimonious organizations have rules of their own and definitions which they adjust to fit their preferred targets. Both organizations would rather target democratic states as their accommodations are often of a higher level of comfort and these targets are far more sensitive and less likely to shoot first and ask questions rarely. These organizations would prefer Israel to Gaza, Syria or most other areas in the Middle East. They would prefer to inspect Egypt from Alexandria or Cairo than the Sinai Peninsula or anywhere in Libya or the Sudan. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Gulf States are preferable to Yemen and almost anywhere is preferable to northern Nigeria where Boko Haram works their horrors. Europe is preferable to anywhere in the Third World.

 

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte

 

Their field inspections are more tailored to five star hotels than actual trouble spots. Their hypocrisy is only out done by their padded expense accounts’ and even that is a close race. They both avoid making accusation about police states such as China, Turkey, Myanmar or Turkey outside the main cities and even those are losing their luster. With the fine beaches and five star resorts in the Philippines and Israel, it is no wonder these two organizations have redundant subgroups all but assigned to giving first class air fare, placing these inspection bodies with reservations along the Tel Aviv beaches or the gorgeous resorts all along the northern Philippine Islands and Manilla. It is difficult to take almost anything either the United Nations or United States State Department accuse certain nation of being guilty of when these adjudications are more attuned to vacation season than actual criminal activities. What a world we reside in and we owe President Duterte a tip of our hats for making such needful accusations against the two grandest fraudulent hypocritical organizations on the planet.

 

Beyond the Cusp 

 

Final Palestinian Israel War Declared at United Nations

 

Yesterday Arab Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas gave a screed at the United Nations General Assembly opening ceremonies, which have been going on all week, filled with invectives and pure bile and hot hatreds against Israel, civility and the general decency which differentiates the human race from the base beasts of the wilds. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu gave his response today and fortunately spent little precious time addressing Abbas and his inflammatory speech simply stating that Israel was prepared to meet and negotiate with no precondition for the formation of an Arab state which would be demilitarized living beside Israel immediately and hoped that Abbas would take this opportunity. The video and the transcript for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s United Nations speech can be viewed on our special page. Much of the rest of the Prime Minister’s speech entailed the problems which will hatch as a result of the ill negotiated Iranian nuclear deal and impressed that Israel would take whatever steps deemed necessary to protect the Israeli population of Six Million Jews as well as its one-million-seven-hundred-thousand Arabs and the remainder of just over one-third a million other peoples. Where the Prime Minister spent but a small section of the ending of his speech to address the situation with the Arab Palestinians and the refusal since the signing of the Oslo Accords that is the refusal of Mahmoud Abbas, and Yasser Arafat before him, to reach any peace deal as doing so would require them to rule. This would bring to an end the gravy train of funds siphoned off from every Euro, Pound and Dollar received into their foreign accounts. Even this was a waste of time and needless as any recognition given Abbas and his grandstanding only further serves his aggressions against all of Israel. So, what has been the main development between the speeches by Abbas and Netanyahu?

 

Prime Minister Netanyahu delivered, as usual, an excellent speech but accomplished little by doing so. The forty-five seconds of silence may have been the most effective use of his time. Mahmoud Abbas may have delivered the most important address of which the initial effects may have already been felt. The Arab Palestinian Chairman delivered, to find the essence of his speech and deliver it in as short a set of terms as possible and as succinctly as possible, he delivered a declaration of war. There is no other way to interpret what Abbas’s speech was about. With the PA disbanded, as it was a construct of the Oslo Accords, we are left with Fatah which is synonymous with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) which was originally founded in 1964, a full three years before there existed any “occupied territories” and the charter read as their mission to complete the tasks necessary to erase Israel and replace Israel with another Arab and Muslim State. This PLO terror instrument never altered their aims of eradicating the Jewish State but had tabled any mention of such while under the guise of the PA, thus the PLO went dark. Still there were those who supported the far more belligerent struggles who eventually either joined Hamas, Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda or even Islamic State and if remaining attached to Mahmoud Abbas, though he would regularly claim otherwise, he still listed himself as their commander. There was the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades which would every so often claim responsibility for a terror attack but found their survival more easily maintained if they just kept quiet about their operations. Well, perhaps the sole advantage is that now the leadership can declare their ownership of violent events and potentially take credit for their dastardly deal. Abbas and the rest of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda, Islamic State and al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades can proudly exclaim and praise their “brave warriors” when they assault unarmed Jews with lethal projectiles such as bricks, boulders and anything else, even bullets. The bullets were scarcely used as the projectile of preference as they immediately conveyed the concept that any such attack was attempted murder. Rocks the size of basketballs hurled into a windshield from a pickup truck with five or six youths riding in the bed each with such a rock as well as some softball or croquette size rocks as secondary ammunition and these projectiles were fired from a truck speeding in the opposite direction often at speeds over one-hundred KPH. Below are a collection of rocks that were hurled and a rare few had articles with actual pictures of these projectiles, though usually they simply report that rocks struck a vehicle. Such reports were always a bit strange and would leave one scratching their head and wondering to oneself how in all that is holy did rocks just leap out of nowhere to strike Israeli licensed vehicles.

 

 

 

What Israel, her people and especially her rulers must realize, internalize, and refuse to rationalize and instead proceed to actualize is this new information and new situation between Israel and the PLO is an actual declaration of war upon Israel. The very first item is no Zionist should ever mutter the Arab Palestinian Authority or PA as that institution was murdered by Abbas at the United Nations. The next step is to form a near immediate change in policy where any Israeli citizen, which includes the Arabs residing in East Jerusalem, throwing rocks or setting off pyrotechnics should be immediately arrested while any Arab noncitizen committing a similar act should be given a ticket on an El Al aircraft and flown to either the nation they chose or the closest such nation willing to accept them until their flight on an additional ticket boards to complete their transport to wherever they desire outside all of Israel permanently. The only other option is to build extremely large detention centers and in one section hold those who as Israeli citizens assaulted others in a nationalist terror manner under current definitions to keep them imprisoned for the duration of the conflict and the rest of complex built to hold those who are not Israeli citizens who will simply commit an act of war and been captured and must now serve their term until the war is finished and a permanent peace has been established. Abbas declared war and the leader of the nation which was named in the Abbas’s declaration of war, Israel, offered to sit and work out a peace agreement which could also lead to making peace with and having all Arab States agree to end their incitement as well. That is not going to happen anytime soon.

 

Israel is at war with the Iranians who have made it evidently clear that one of the first endeavors for their nuclear weapons within the next decade will be to eradicate Israel wiping it from the face of the Earth. Israel is at war with the Islamic State though that front will likely not become an active front for a number of years. Israel is at war with Bashir al-Assad and Hezballah along with any others including the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, in particular their al-Quds force which is dedicated to conquering Jerusalem, in Syria fighting for al-Assad or even a fair number of the other factions. Then there are others with whom Israel is still technically in a state of war such as Lebanon, Syria and other Middle Eastern nations from all the way back to the initial war to destroy Israel and slaughter every last Jew they could find from May 15th of 1948 where the war broke out before the ink could have dried on the speech read by David ben Gurion declaring Israel to be born with borders being between the Sinai Peninsula and the Negev Desert including Gaza as within Israel, the Lebanese northern border pretty much exactly as it is with a few small and minor areas to be debated and a border with Syria which gave Israel within her rights but the fence they erected was done inside Syrian borders and lastly Jordan with whom the original border was the Jordan River. These should be the borders Israel demands as a sovereign nation amongst the fellowship of nations. But the immediate war is the one which is taking place within our border. It would not surprise me that if allowed the latitude to control and area of the now defunct authority that Mahmoud Abbas may attempt to parlay his membership and recognition in a number of United Nations committees and call for Iran to come and assist in defending the Temple Mount and al-Aqsa Mosque. The danger of such an eventuality must produce actions of purpose and heightened reality and the brotherhood prevented entrance into any of these fronts.

 

The first fatalities of this newly redeclared war, the war was initiated originally by Mohammad when he altered complete verses and declared Mecca, not Jerusalem as he first indicated, to be the holiest of cities followed by Medina where Mohammad realized his victory over the older established religion of Judaism. There are many stories and explanations as to the reasons for the enmity which existed between the Jews of Medina and Mohammad and the Muslims. The problems reached their climax with the beheading of nearly one thousand Jews from the Banu Qurayzah tribe. This supposed trial and finding of guilt leading to the execution of every single adult aged male and the sale of the women and children into slavery was but the first step. The most famous victory of Muslim forces against the Jews at the very beginning of Islam took place at the battle at Khaybar where the remainders of the Jews of Medina were slaughtered and their wealth, women and children were sold into slavery. This has led to the modern day Islamic tradition, the chant “Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud, Jaish Muhammad, sa yahud,” translated means, “Jews, remember Khaybar, the army of Muhammad is returning,” and is used as a battle cry when attacking Jews or Israelis. That has been the chant on many a university campus and other anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic gathering often protesting the lack of a lasting peace having been negotiated between Israel and the Arabs claiming to be from a mythical construct which has never existed called Palestine. This war has now returned full bore and charging into another attempted bloodletting of Israel be Islamic forces from near and far coming again as was the case in 1948-9, and again in 1967 for the Six Day War, and to a lesser extent in 1973 for the Yom Kippur War. The problem is that with modern weapons on both sides, and once Iran turns nuclear forcing a similar development in Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and who knows who else, the potentials for destruction on an unimagined scale is staring back at us from some future date when humanity becomes a forgotten trait and barbarism rules the day and the carnage will be immeasurable.

 

In the meantime the initiation of war had been announced and the first casualties have paid with their lives in the latest ambush of Jews by Arabs from the Fatah Party of Mahmoud Abbas, the purported angel of peace. This final war over the claims that the Jews have no rights or place being in Israel, and more so Jerusalem and never ever had any claim or Temples on the Temple Mount is imminent. This war began with the riots instigated by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini in the 1920s and on through the declaration of the State of Israel where he then led the local Muslim militias in the war of annihilation brought by over a half dozen Arab armies against the nascent state of Israel with genocidal aims to destroy the Jewish state in its crib. This latest and hopefully last war began in the year 2000 when Yasser Arafat declared what has rightfully become known as the Oslo War as it was as a direct result of the ill-fated desire for a civil peace where the Jews and Arabs could prosper together was the initiation of the efforts by some Pollyannish efforts to renew the moribund peace process which brought back the arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat as well as his trusted and close number two, Mahmoud Abbas. The Oslo Accords were entered into by Arafat and Abbas in order to regain a foothold that would lead to their long hoped but never quite attainable victory over the Jews and a second Holocaust would ensue, that was and still is the dream from one side of the “peace process.” This last wave of assaults has largely targeted Jerusalem and the Temple Mount as Abbas is fully aware that if he can chase the Jews from the Temple Mount, from all the Jewish holy sites in Judea and Samaria, and chase the Jews from all of the Old City of Jerusalem he will have decapitated the Jewish people and cut us from what is to us our lifeline which we have longed for for almost two-thousand years and has been the greatest joy, our strength, and our redemption. The initial threats were words which led to screaming mobs bumping and jostling IDF guards on duty hoping to capture some film or picture which could be interpreted as a frown on the face of a soldier and blow that up into an international incident. Then came the stones, then larger stones, then fireworks, then more even larger stones, then simply more stones at the ambush sites, then boulders followed by firebombs and it had to get here eventually but now it has become bullets, deadly bullets.

 

 

 

Pictured above are the parents so brutally murdered as explained in the caption above which reads, “Eitam and Naama Henkin and four of their children were in the car when the ambush was sprung and the shooting began. The children were unhurt in the gunfire but both parents were brutally and cold bloodedly murdered for the crime of being Jews. This was the first volley of the coming war which Mahmoud Abbas declared this past week when he told the world that any semblance of peace was over. This was the first volley as Mahmoud Abbas has thrown the Oslo Accords aside torn, tattered and burning into ashes, and Abbas has turned the clock back to 1964 and the PLO’s original Charter which called for the slaughter of the Jews in Israel, another Holocaust, another Shoah the murder of six-million Jews again to start another world at war, once again into the breach except this will be the final war which we have dread would come.” This is probably the farthest thing they could ever imagine, the being the initial victims of humanity at its most inhumane of levels and plotting for much, much more in the coming days, weeks, months and possibly the rest of the time mankind will have as an advanced species, which begs the question of how we can call ourselves advanced when we cannot even share a small square kilometer of space in what most agree is a holy city of peace, or that is what she has been named, Yerushalayim, Zion the city of peace.  ירושלים, ציון עיר השלום

 

Taking full credit for this gruesome slaughter in a hail of gunfire was senior Fatah official Azzam al-Ahmed who told Hamas’s Al-Quds TV, “the attack is a natural response to the crimes of the settlers and every action has a reaction.” These crimes of the settlers are nothing more than the fact that they live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. This is the crime for which all the violence since the nineteenth century starting as early if not even further back with the 1834 looting of Safed (ביזת צפת בשנת תקצ”ד) where Jewish homes were looted and burned, synagogues were similarly looted and burned including the burning and other desecrations of the Torah scrolls and raping of the Jewish women and the murder of many of the Jews who remained in Safed as this continued for over a month. Furthermore, al-Aloul was noted by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) as having written on his Facebook page, “The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the military wing of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement Fatah, accepted responsibility for the Itamar operation carried out against settlers, leading to their deaths.” The Itamar operation carried out against settlers, translates to the cold blooded murder by the forces of evil this time reaching out to grasp and harm the most innocent as that way the terror is of the greatest shock value and terrorists aim for shock value as well as unarmed and unsuspecting people and seldom soldiers on duty but their war is against the innocent. We will hear from the pro-Arab Palestinian, anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic protesters on some university campus or at some erudite cultural poetry reading where a Fatah representative will be present to read their poem, Ode to being Odious which tells of their great victory of the brave Arab Fatah freedom fighters, they must never be called terrorists as that might hurt their feelings and harm their self-esteem, and telling the tale will win him admiration and acclaim as the latest poetic genius.

 

Sometimes the anger at the senseless slaughter of innocent people and the news coming as it did leading into the Sabbath and one must now challenge themselves to rid their mind of disturbances thinking of the poor young children and the oldest two all of which will miss the love and care only a parent can provide. Others can do the exact same things, say the exact same words, be the same in every way except they are not the child’s parent and the child will know that difference which is why this has taken away innocence and replaced it with the hard and cruel reality of the fruits of hatreds. Bat-Sheva Sadan wrote the following in Hebrew but translated here about the challenges and the affects and effects of the loss of both their parents on their younger siblings. The deep emotion makes this a definitive read and I would beg that you take in the depth of feelings put into what would be mere words but this combination spoke to us here. The one item I might have to say is that when they feared the youngest might not remember the parents at all, not any number of things but they included smell. That may not be correct and will be proven likely at some point when the youngest is a little older and gets solemn for no apparent reason as they are walking in a mall, to synagogue or strolling along the beach boardwalk and when asked what is wrong their answer will be, ‘Nothing, really, just the last lady’s perfume reminded me of mom’ and it will come out of the blue and all will enjoy their own little memory that day all because small is the strongest and longest lasting of impressions especially between a mother and child.

 

The deaths of Eitam and Naama Henkin may be the deaths which history will remember as the initial shot fired which started the final conflict. They may be the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie who were murdered which set things into motion resulting in World War I. This just may be another possible echo from history. These echoes always seem to be worrisome as they are usually repeating things we would prefer not to repeat. We must pray this Sabbath and every Sabbath as these are dangerous times where simple events can take on gargantuan meaning, and this double murder is of great enough magnitude that it receiving more is beyond the cusp and all that is safe and sane.

 

Beyond the Cusp