...

Since the office e-mail is down (as it is much more often than it should) I have time to vent about something that I’ve been stewing over since yesterday morning.

Many of you likely heard about the terror bombing yesterday in Tel Aviv. Sadly, such an occurrence is much too common to elicit any feeling of shock — at least from me. But despite the ‘business as usual’ sentiment, this particular bombing stirred my ire more than any of the others in recent memory.

So many aspects of this attack seem to make it more brutal, at least in my opinion. First of all, there is a quote from one of the witnesses (that, incidentally, I put in today’s paper, just because I have that kind of authority) describing one of the victims of the attack:

“The father was traumatized. He went into shock. He ran to the children to gather them up and the children were screaming, ‘Mom! Mom!’ and she wasn’t answering. She was already dead.”

Spokesmen for the Hamas-lead Palestinian government justified such attacks as self-defense for the Palestinian territories. Now, I don’t know exactly what kind of threat was posed by that woman that justified her being killed in front of her husband and children. Nor do I know exactly what kind of threat existed at a bus stop in an economic hub that’s not even part of the so-called “Palestinian territories.”

I generally try to give people, and humanity in general, the benefit of the doubt. But events such as this genuinely test my faith. The wholesale disregard for all things sacred is simply dumbfounding, if not horrifying.

Say what you will about the supposed “occupation of Palestine” or the “plight of the Palestinians,” but I still don’t see how anything can justify the targeting, killing and slaughter of innocent people. Much less during Passover and the day after Easter.

But this blatant disregard for all things decent is nothing new, either. In Iraq, Sunni bombers attacked a Shi’ite funeral. Israel was once invaded on Yom Kippur.

I’ve long held the belief that the title of “human being” was not permanent. That is to say, every person is born with the title, but it can be revoked. When a person rapes and murders a child, they are, in my opinion, no longer considered human. Humans don’t rape and murder children. Likewise, when a person straps explosives to his body and targets innocent civilians, he has waived his right to be called human — as have all those that celebrate and justify such actions.

What bothers me most is the unwillingness of people to stand up to this nonsense. These actions are at the very least accepted, if not condoned, under the guise that “it’s a culture that we don’t understand, and that’s just what Muslims do.” No. That’s not good enough. I don’t have to be a member of the culture to understand that attacks like this are subhuman. Human beings do not randomly and maliciously kill other human beings. It’s time that more people said that, particularly in the Arab world. But it’s not going to happen.

A woman is dead, shredded by shrapnel as her husband and children looked on. She is one of eight other victims whose families are today all experiencing the same anguish. As are the families of the hundreds, if not thousands, of other victims over the years.

And for what? It’s something that I still, and likely always will, have difficulty fathoming.