The Human Cost of the Jihad Against Israel

The Human Cost of the Jihad Against Israel

http://frontpagemag.com/2010/12/29/the-human-cost-of-the-jihad-against-israel/

Posted by Robert Spencer on Dec 29th, 2010 and filed under FrontPage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of ten books, eleven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran (Regnery), and he is coauthor (with Pamela Geller) of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America (Simon and Schuster).

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Almost every day at Jihad Watch I chronicle yet another incident of jihadist mass-murder: jihadists kill sixteen with suicide bomb outside a church, jihadists kill ten with a bomb at a hospital, and on and on. So many murders, so many dead, and in virtually all the news stories about each jihad attack, the only thing we’re told about the victims is their number.

“The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic,” goes the old adage often wrongly attributed to Joseph Stalin, and it’s true: it is all too easy to forget that behind the each one of the huge numbers of victims of the jihad today is a human story, an individual with a life, with loves, with plans, with hopes.

But it is essential that we not forget this, for our own sake – for the sake of our resolve in continuing to fight against the global jihad and Islamic supremacism. It is essential that we not allow ourselves to become desensitized to the human cost of this great struggle for freedom. It is essential that we realize the full magnitude of what the jihadists are taking from us: the lives they are destroying, and the emotional devastation they are leaving in their wake: the burdens they’re placing on people who are not combatants, who never expected to find themselves in the middle of a war, and who are being let down on a massive scale by those who have sworn to protect them.

That is what is so valuable about Italian journalist Giulio Meotti’s A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel’s Victims of Terrorism. Israel has lost 1,500 people to the Second Intifada over the last ten years – the equivalent of about 54,000 victims of jihad terror in the United States. Islamic jihadists have murdered them on buses, in restaurants, at synagogues, and anywhere else they could. Meotti interviewed dozens of the victims’ families and survivors of jihad attacks, and introduces us to a few of the ordinary and extraordinary people whose lives were cut short by those attacks. He brings them back from the realm of “statistic” to that of “tragedy,” and in the process, reminds us of the real reasons why we fight, why we resist the Islamic jihad against Israel and the West, why the U.S. must stand with Israel, and why we must prevail.