A Redeeming Moment

For a change, Taranto posted something with which I agree (see, in particular, the last paragraph):

"Prime Minister Ariel Sharon issued a statement calling the attack 'a criminal act of a bloodthirsty terrorist targeting innocent Israeli civilians,' " the Jerusalem Post reports about a violent incident in the Israeli town of Shfaram yesterday. What makes this unusual is that the perpetrator was Jewish and his victims Arab. Agence France-Presse has the story:

A teenage Israeli soldier shot dead four people in a blazing row over the country's imminent withdrawal from Gaza before being lynched by furious residents of an Arab-Israeli town. . . .

The 19-year-old religiously observant Jew, dressed in army fatigues, unleashed a volley of fire inside a bus in the northern Galilee town of Shfaram in an argument over the pullout, police said.

Actually, as the Boston Globe notes, the attacker, Eden Natan-Zada, was a military deserter. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs has a statement that makes clear Sharon isn't just paying lip service to the victims:

The prime minister on Friday, 5 August 2005, instructed the National Insurance Institute and all related bodies to treat yesterday's murders in Shfaram as an act of terrorism in every respect and to grant all assistance as provided for by law to the bereaved families and the wounded.

Arutz Sheva reports that "the killer's parents, worried over their son's radical change, said they had asked the army to take away their son's weapon."

In the typical terrorist attack by Palestinian Arabs, Palestinian officials, if they criticize it at all, do so only on the ground that it's counterproductive, and the parents usually hail their child's "martyrdom." So, while Jewish terrorists are every bit as despicable as Arab ones, Israel's response to this atrocity shows that Jewish civilization is vastly superior to its Arab counterpart.