Terror returns to Jerusalem

By now, you wil have see the reports of the bomb at a crowded bus stop in Jerusalem, which killed one and injured dozens.

Police said it was a Palestinian "suicide attack" and is the first such bombing in Jerusalem in seven years.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast, which police said was caused by a bomb planted close to the city's main conference hall and central bus terminal.

There are already suggestions that the bomb was planted in retaliation for the Israeli Air Force attack on Gaza terrorist that tragically reulted in the death of an innocent family.

Melanie Philips has the following astute observation on the Spectator web site:

An interview transmitted a few minutes ago on BBC World with the Editor-in-Chief of the Jerusalem Post, David Horowitz, established what I’m sure will be the signature motif of moral imbecility with which this latest atrocity will be reported by the British and western media. The interviewer asked whether this bomb attack was most likely in response to the recent Israeli attacks on Gaza in which eight civilians, four of them children, had been killed.

After a small but perceptible intake of breath, Horowitz replied correctly that the recent atrocity of note had been the cold-blooded massacre of the Fogel family including a three-month old baby, who had had their throats slit. This had been followed by an enormous rocket and missile barrage from Gaza into southern Israel. The Israeli bombing of Gaza's terror infrastructure had been an attempt to deter further such attacks; regrettably, some Gazan civilians had been killed in the process.

Clearly, there is currently a huge upsurge in murderous violence by Arabs from the disputed territories, of which this bus bombing is but the latest example. It therefore takes a particular degree of bone-headed malevolence to view this latest attack instead as a ‘tit-for-tat' response to Israeli violence. But then, the BBC and other British and western media have all but ignored the rocket attacks, and minimised the Fogel massacre. As usual, Israeli victimisation is thus denied in an obscene moral equivalence – which invariably turns Israel from a victim attempting to defend itself into the aggressor.

But the media’s culpability does not end there with its mere perversion of journalism. The fact that it can be relied upon to blame the Israelis for their own slaughter means that the slaughterers believe they can murder Israelis with impunity – better still, that the more Israelis they murder, the more Israel will be blamed; and if Israel should take military action to stop the attacks, the world will punish Israel and reward its attackers even more.

Thus the western media is not just an observer but an active player in the Middle East tragedy. And Israel should say so.