An Extremely Slippery Slope

Mark Steyn had an essential column over the weekend, worth reading in its entirety, but excerpted as follows:

Tom Gross produced a jaw-dropping round-up of Bombay media coverage:  The discovery that, for the first time in an Indian terrorist atrocity, Jews had been attacked, tortured, and killed produced from the New York Times a serene befuddlement:  “It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene.”

. . . At the Chabad House, the murdered Jews were described in almost all the Western media as “ultra-Orthodox,” “ultra-” in this instance being less a term of theological precision than a generalized code for “strange, weird people, nothing against them personally, but they probably shouldn’t have been over there in the first place.”  Are they stranger or weirder than their killers?  Two “inflamed moderates” entered the Chabad House, shouted “Allahu Akbar!,” tortured the Jews and murdered them, including the young Rabbi’s pregnant wife.  Their two-year-old child escaped because of a quick-witted (non-Jewish) nanny who hid in a closet and then, risking being mown down by machine-gun fire, ran with him to safety.

The Times was being silly in suggesting this was just an “accidental” hostage opportunity — and not just because, when Muslim terrorists capture Jews, it’s not a hostage situation, it’s a mass murder-in-waiting.  The sole surviving “militant” revealed that the Jewish center had been targeted a year in advance.  The 28-year-old rabbi was Gavriel Holtzberg.  His pregnant wife was Rivka Holtzberg.  Their orphaned son is Moshe Holtzberg, and his brave nanny is Sandra Samuels.  Remember their names, not because they’re any more important than the Indians, Britons, and Americans targeted in the attack on
Bombay, but because they are an especially revealing glimpse into the pathologies of the perpetrators.

. . . Rabbi Holtzberg was not murdered because of a territorial dispute over
Kashmir or because of Bush’s foreign policy.  He was murdered in the name of Islam — “Allahu Akbar.”

I wrote in my book, America Alone, that “reforming” Islam is something only Muslims can do.  But they show very little sign of being interested in doing it . . . .  Spread a rumor that a Koran got flushed down the can at Gitmo, and there’ll be rioting throughout the Muslim world.  Publish some dull cartoons in a minor Danish newspaper, and there’ll be protests around the planet.  But slaughter the young pregnant wife of a rabbi in
Bombay in the name of Allah, and that’s just business as usual.  And, if it is somehow “understandable” that for the first time in history it’s no longer safe for a Jew to live in
India, then we are greasing the skids for a very slippery slope.