On October 3, during Chol Hamoed, the joy and beauty of the Sukkot holiday was shattered by the brutal murder of Rabbi Eitam Henkin, age 31, and his wife Naama, age 30, as they drove in the Shomron with their four young children; the youngest was 4 months, the oldest a 9 year old. Rabbi Henkin was a brilliant Torah scholar, his wife Naama a gifted graphic artist and designer. <\/p>\n
The violence has now spread across Israel \u2013 from Yerushalayim to Petach Tikva, Gush Etzion, Kiryat Gat, Tel Aviv, Afula, Kiryat Arba and elsewhere \u2013 bringing countless new attacks and new tragedies; and ever more families mourning the loss of loved ones. How do we persuade the world to take notice; to care? How do we persuade the world that these heinous acts are not \u2013 and can never be equated with \u2013 political actions by rivals on the geopolitical stage. If only we could take the world by the neck and shake it until it recognized that these acts are murders, perpetrated by madmen filled with the hatred of Jews \u2013 murderers no different than marauding bands of Crusaders; murderers no different than rampaging Cossacks; murderers no different than those that slaughtered six million Kedoshim because they were Jews. <\/p>\n
![\"palestiniancartoon\"](\"https:\/\/www.ou.org\/life\/files\/palestiniancartoon-300x199.jpg\")
Today, these murderers are nourished by the culture of hate that permeates the Palestinian media and is embedded in their schools. Just look at the picture to the right — a caricature displayed prominently on Palestinian social media, depicting Jews walking on a knife blade towards a grave shaped like, in their words, \u201cGreater Palestine.\u201d The headstone reads: \u201cCemetery of the invaders.\u201d<\/p>\n
The world\u2019s silence in the face of such unmitigated hatred is deafening. Worse, it is sickening in its blatant hypocrisy. After a Palestinian in the Old City slashed an Israeli woman and her infant son, and stabbed her husband to death, together with a Rabbi who had rushed to their rescue, and was halted in his rampage only when he was shot, the BBC headline read: \u201cPalestinian Shot Dead After Fatal Stabbing in Jerusalem; 2 Israeli Victims Also Killed.\u201d The Palestinian Authority\u2019s official announcement condemned Israel for killing a seemingly innocent Palestinian, without ever mentioning the brutal, unprovoked murder of Israelis. Watch the video<\/a>, it doesn\u2019t lie. The stabbed mother, Adele Benita, described from her hospital bed how Arab bystanders had \u201cmurder in their eyes,\u201d laughed and spat at her as she sought to run, bleeding, from the scene of her husband\u2019s murder. Following the murder of the Henkins, hy\u201dd, Palestinians handed out sweets, waved PA flags and launched fireworks in celebration. Watch the video<\/a>, it doesn\u2019t lie. UN chief Ban Ki-moon condemned the killing of Palestinians, but failed even to mention the Jewish victims. <\/p>\n We live in a world of perverted moral equivalency, where brutal murders are equated with the most careful efforts to maintain security. It is only in a world of such demented parallels that our State Department condemns the violence, and urges \u201call sides\u201d to avoid escalating tension. Evenhandedness is praiseworthy, but only when both antagonists are similarly situated. When they are not \u2013 and as we have seen over and over in the past days and years, they most assuredly are not \u2013 evenhandedness is a moral abdication; evenhandedness in the face of murder and unadulterated hatred must be exposed for what it is. There are not two sides to every story; there is only justice and decency.<\/p>\n At Rabbi Eitam Henkin\u2019s levaya, he was eulogized by his brother, Dr. Yigal Henkin. His words should echo like a clarion call to all who seek to reduce the murder of innocents to just another manifestation of political controversy: <\/p>\n \u201c\u2026 it was not blind fate which took the lives of Eitam and Naama. They are \u201cHarugei Malchut<\/em>,\u201d the term used for those who died as part of the unceasing struggle of the Jewish people\u2026 Eitam and Naama were not killed by \u201cterror.\u201d They are victims of an act of hostility. Human beings driven by hatred went out to the road in order to murder Jews, and they succeeded.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Immediately after the conclusion of yom tov, I, together with Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, OU Executive Vice President Emeritus, Rabbi Avi Berman, Director of OU Israel, and Mr. Norman Schmutter, paid a shiva visit to Rabbi Yehudah and Rabbanit Chana Henkin in their home in the Kiryat Moshe neighborhood of Yerushalayim. I first met Rabbanit Henkin when she stayed in our home some twenty years ago, on one of her first trips to the United States to raise the funds for what would become Nishmat, that truly extraordinary educational enterprise and Makom Torah. She and her husband are remarkable individuals and have dedicated their lives to the betterment of Klal Yisroel. It was impossible to find adequate words of nechama <\/em>(consolation).<\/p>\n Outside the Henkins\u2019 building three Druze men stood in flowing white robes, one the father of Druze policeman Zidan Sayif (who was killed trying to rescue the victims of the Har Nof massacre). Inside, a young man whose parents had been murdered in a terror attack twelve years ago had come to offer words of consolation. I could not help but recognize the growing \u2013 the ever growing \u2013 fraternity of mourners, united by the common bond of pain and loss and the consequences of senseless hatred. When will it end? When will this fraternity dissolve for lack of members? When will we stop visiting parents and grandparents, husbands and wives, to offer words of condolence to those who cannot be consoled?<\/p>\n And where are our own leaders? Why have they not condemned \u2013 in a clear, unequivocal and forceful way \u2013 the indiscriminate slaughter of Jewish innocents. I have been to the White House several times in the past year? On one of those occasions, the President turned to the representatives of the major Jewish organizations assembled in the Roosevelt Room and, in a highly emotional moment, stated solemnly that he would consider it a personal moral failure if Israel\u2019s security was diminished on his watch. But Israel\u2019s security is more than the power of its army and air force and missile defense system. Israel\u2019s security includes \u2013 indeed, it rests upon \u2013 the safety and well-being of its citizens; the ability to drive from place to place without being stoned; the ability to walk freely and confidently in the Old City; the ability to daven in shul without fear of attack; the ability to live a peaceful, normal life where 9 year olds don\u2019t say Kaddish for saintly fathers and mothers murdered because they are Jews. The moral failure, Mr. President, is in not telling it like it is; without equivocation; without moral equivalency when there is none; without covering for unmitigated hatred through the niceties of diplomatic discourse. May God grant you the wisdom, and the courage, to speak the truth and protect its sanctity. <\/p>\n May Hashem bless us all, and may the mitzvah of ve-samachta be-chagecha<\/em> be fulfilled in fullness and in universal joy. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There is nothing as incomparably, magnificently festive as Yerushalayim just prior to, and during Sukkot. The city is illuminated by the incandescent sunshine of the pre-rainy season. Everywhere one looks, sukkot in infinitely varied sizes and styles dominate the streetscape. The markets are filled with yom tov shoppers, pushing and shoving in the finest Israeli<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_cloudinary_featured_overwrite":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[85,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-inspiration","category-israel"],"yoast_head":"\n