When Did Terrorists Become Untouchable?

We are living through an extraordinary time of moral reversion. Perversion, actually, is more like it.

The way far too many valorize evil and demonize the good is truly breathtaking.

Evidence of shattered moral clarity is everywhere. Terrorists are transformed into freedom fighters. We judge them not harshly; we judge not at all. Bloodthirsty enablers and cheerleaders of terrorism are infantilized as “innocent civilians.”

Meanwhile, actually innocent teenage girls attending a music concert are fair game for gang rape. In Europe, Muslims raping white women are chalked up to “cultural differences.” In Israel, babies too young for kindergarten are deemed perfect for kindling. No head in the Middle East and Persian Gulf—other than that belonging to a mullah—is safe from beheading.

Those who insist on severing body parts are merely adhering to the pieties of fundamentalist Islam.

Closer to home, this week we learned that narco-terrorists are merely nautical-loving seafarers. Their cargo might as well be mangos and bananas.

Our children are indoctrinated into glorifying villainy. Our mass media trivializes barbarism or ignores it altogether. People shamelessly speak within polite company that any Israeli—or Jew, for that matter—should be killed “by any means necessary.” The evil of Hamas is re-characterized as the benign actions of misunderstood teenagers from rough neighborhoods.

The evil of Hamas is re-characterized as the benign actions of misunderstood teenagers from rough neighborhoods.

We recently reached a new low. The never-ending parade of celebrities whose only reading is confined to scripts they are paid to read, was at it again. Some 200, including Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Ruffalo, Cynthia Nixon, Sir Ian McKellen, Paul Simon, Tilda Swinton, Stephen Fry, Margaret Atwood, Sting and Brian Eno, signed a petition demanding that Israel release from its prisons the notorious Palestinian terrorist, Marwan Barghouti.

Why? Well, Palestinians are deprived of responsible leadership, and polls show that most of them would like to see Barghouti as president of the Palestinian Authority. This statesman-in-waiting is presently serving five life sentences for mass murder.

Hollywood sure knows how to pick them.

Barghouti is one of the masterminds of the terror that accompanied the Second Intifada. Well over 1,000 Israelis were killed by suicide bombers—with Barghouti’s blood-soaked fingerprints left at every crime scene.

Two teenagers at a Tel Aviv disco. Suicide bombers killing hundreds of Jews: at a hotel celebrating Passover in Natanya, cafes and buses in Jerusalem, pizza shops in Tel Aviv. Barghouti personally killed five Israelis, including a Greek monk and a man having dinner in a restaurant.

The petition calling for his immediate release describes this monster as “a husband and a father” and a “nation-builder, . . . a powerful symbol of unity [who has been] illegally held by Israel” for more than two decades.

None of his crimes seem to matter. All he did was kill Jews. No “bridge over troubled water” for Paul Simon, who proudly lent his name. Barghouti is, after all, a political prisoner of an illegitimate regime. The petition even compares him to Nelson Mandela, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient who never detonated bombs in South Africa.

Unfortunately for these pampered buffoons whose only daily challenge is keeping their beleaguered assistants nearby, Israel knows their terrain much better than these actors know the backlot at MGM.

The mastermind of October 7, 2023, Yahyah Sinwar, was released from an Israeli prison in 2011, along with 1,000 of his fellow terrorists. Every single one of them went right back into the family business of murdering Jews. Not even one chose a different line of work.

Let’s face it: The hard left has always romanticized revolutionary violence—whether Stalin, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, the IRA in Ireland, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, and, of course, Arab terrorists calling themselves Palestinians fighting for liberation.

Violence against Jews isn’t deemed violence at all—but self-righteous expressions of human rights and social justice. Who wouldn’t want to root for that?

Violence against Jews isn’t deemed violence at all—but self-righteous expressions of human rights and social justice. Who wouldn’t want to root for that?

This moral dementia has even found its way into the American political scene—wholly apart from the anti-Israel factions of the far left and, most recently, the far right. We seem to be getting sentimental about the lives and general welfare of avowed terrorists who mean to do us harm. Does the Democratic Party still believe that its hero, Barack Obama, was correct in ordering the assassination of Osama bin Laden? Are SEAL Team Six still heroes, or assassins?

How about the 2011 drone strike Obama ordered that killed American citizen and Islamist radicalizer Anwar al-Wiaki in Yemen? Bin Laden was a Saudi, but Obama killed an American citizen without due process or authorization from Congress.

Anyone losing any sleep over his death in today’s more humanitarian climate of untouchable terrorists? The Council on Foreign Relations credits the Obama administration with launching 540 drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen that killed over 1,000 people, many being civilians.

Was President Trump wrong in taking out ISIS kingpin Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019? It’s a fair question given the tumult caused by the U.S. military’s recent aggressive attacks against drug-running boats off the coastal waters of Latin America. This past Thursday, four narco-terrorists were killed.

President Trump and the Pentagon have been busy in the Caribbean these days. Since early September, they have launched 22 strikes on vessels without providing evidence that they were trafficking drugs. Then again, Obama never produced the bodies of bin Laden and al-Wiaki.

Estimates are that 87 people have been killed in these drug boat operations. President Trump is treating drug cartels who are poisoning Americans with illicit drugs as the work of foreign terror organizations.

One congressman, Jim Himes from Connecticut, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, called a second drone strike that sunk the cargo and killed the terrorists who survived the first strike as “one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service.”

Seriously? More troubling than 9/11? Worse than 10/7? Congressman Himes must be treating opioids like Milk Duds.

Maybe he has evidence that these ships aren’t commandeered by drug cartels at all. Perhaps they are merely carrying drunken fraternity brothers out on a fishing trip? A boatload of marine science students tagging whales in the Caribbean, perhaps?

President Trump claims that for every drug boat the United States sinks, the lives of 25,000 Americans are saved. I am surprised PETA isn’t protesting the drug addictions we are imposing on unsuspecting fish nibbling on fentanyl.

Just wait—that, too, is coming.