Beyond Sadness!

How easy it is to be sad! How easy and yet how debilitating. I attended the funeral today of Ezra Schwartz, the American boy who was murdered in Israel last Thursday, with my two sons. My boys both attend Maimonides School with him and knew Ezra. As I stood there and listened to the family's beautiful and heart-rending eulogies I was overtaken not so much with sadness but a combination of rage and fear. My boys will graduate from Maimonides next year and go to Israel as Ezra did and I already fear for their safety. As I experience this fear, the rage follows on its heels. 

I understand that the immediate family and close friends need to plumb the depths of their personal devastation. I would never deprive them of that important catharsis but I really think the rest of us need to have a more positive and proactive response.

I am furious that a boy like Ezra can be raised to be such a beautiful human being only to be extinguished by another boy who was raised in a society that feeds its children on a steady diet of Jew-hatred and blood-lust. I am incensed that deaths like Ezra’s are often “rationalized” as an “understandable” result of Arab anger at Israeli policy. My fury is lifted almost beyond my ability to express it to know that even with the evidence of thousands of terror deaths -it is not just since the last intifada, not since 9/11, not since the 1948 war of independence but since the beheading of 900 Jews in Quireiza more than a thousand years ago- that the pathetic likes of Obama can still live in denial of what is causing (and what can remedy) this horror. 

And then, there is the white house statement, issued as only after spokesman Kirby was asked about it during a news conference and after an unseemly delay,  Kirby said, ”We were deeply saddened…,”. Oh yes, there is the sadness again! They referred to Ezra’s murder as one among other "...tragic incidents…" implying that there are what they would call “tragedies” on both sides. 

The name Obama was never associated with this travesty of political correctness, signifying his separating himself from it. The statement never mentions in what name it was committed. It also calls it “tragic”, no less. This is NOT a tragedy. To call it tragic relegates it to an act of fate or God- something about which we can all share saddness.  No, It is an atrocity! 

Until we can name the monstrous ideology that inspired Ezra’s killer and until we can stop ONLY being sad, these atrocities will occur continue again and again. The problem  is that Israel’s restraint and fear of “world opinion” combined with the bootless refusal to recognize the Islamic nature of the terror and the morally bankrupt lack of leadership provided by President Obama have allowed the Palestinians to dream that it their desire to “push the Jews into the Sea” might someday be rewarded with success. They have been encouraged thereby to continue to train their children to hate and murder.

Its right to be sad, but understand that if you are only sad, you will be sadder still in times to come.

Taken together with his cowardice in the face of Putin and his pandering to Islamic radicalism world wide, his treatment of Israel and his handing Nuclear Club membership to Iran, Obama has, as no other human being in history, loosed disorder and violence from the bonds that once constrained them. His memory will be accursed down the ages.