An abandoned suitcase in Dortmund’s main station gets
thousands of people scared of terror. An anonymous bomb threat paralyzes Berlin’s
airport. In the appearance of the Madrid attacks, international terrorism has
outrun everyday life in Europe.
Nobody is safe nowhere anymore: not the tourists strolling
through the cities, not the citizens enjoying their croissant in the cafes, not
the youngsters letting off steam in discos, not the employees getting to work
by suburban railway or underground.
It is obvious to us Europeans: Whatever terrorist
organization may have bombed Madrid, they are brutal criminals who stop at
nothing, who in a back-stabbing manner slaughter civilians, men, women, kids —
whomever may be where they let their bombs detonate. And because it is obvious
to us that we have to deal with murderers — with mass murderers! — we just
don’t want to hear about any political or economical or cultural reasons based
on which human beings mutate to terrorists.
We call for “zero tolerance.” And in our heads, we practice
zero tolerance — for terrorist murder there is not a whiff of justification!
But have we Europeans always and in every case been so
consequent as today, in the days after Madrid? Have we condemned — do we
condemn now with the same rigor the suicide bombings of homicidal mobs of
Hezbollah or Hamas against Israel?
For Israeli children, their ride in a school bus has been
perilous for years; as it has been for young people visiting a disco, tourists
enjoying the sun in a sidewalk cafe and employees on their bus ride to office.
The horrifying Israeli reality, however, has not inhibited
us to assign to the Islamistic terror the aura of the Palestinian David’s
against the Israeli Goliath’s fight. The pictures used by European media to
produce such a distortion of reality are always the same ones: state-of-the-art
armored vehicles and armed Israeli soldiers against stone-casting teenage
Palestinians — plus scenes of destroyed houses and women and men crying their
misery into the cameras.
Who thus could help but to bestow his or her sympathy upon
the deracinated and powerless ones? It then takes nothing else but weighty
Ariel Sharon justifying the Israeli military action in front of the media — and
in the twinkling of an eye the Palestinian propaganda battle is, with Westerly
journalistic support, victoriously slugged out.
This is what has happened for years. We have gotten used to
the terror against Israel as a kind of explicable terror, causing, so to say,
not completely innocent victims. Moreover, nobody really is forced to pay a
risky visit to this small, well-fortified Middle Eastern democracy.
But now, terror is paying a visit to us. And it will stay
with us, in our cities, in our cafés, in our discos, in our suburban and underground
railroad systems, in our airports. We all are Israelis now! Victims! Innocent
victims!
This editorial appeared in SonntagsBlick, the largest
circulation newspaper in Switzerland. Â
Frank A. Meyer is the editorial head of the Ringier Publishing House
