The New Year’s Day terrorist outrage in New Orleans killed 15 people and injured many more. After a similar attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, it showed nowhere in public is safe from a maniac with a van.
But let’s keep a sense of proportion. Heinous as these attacks were, they’re not on the scale of state terror unleashed daily by Israel against Palestinians. On the day that an American ex-serviceman targeted his fellow US citizens, the IDF bombed three civilian sites, killing at least 12, including women and children.
Their deaths bring the total to more than 45,000 since Hamas terror group staged a crazy incursion into Israel, killing 1,200 and taking more than two hundred hostages. Crazy, because they must have known their criminal folly would bring down fire and fury from the most powerful army in the Middle East.
Fifteen months after that atrocity, Israel has destroyed Hamas and its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon, smashed Syria’s defence forces, killed with impunity in Iran and is now poised to crush its enemies in Yemen, 1,200 miles away.
Peace talks have been going on for as long as the war, but they show little sign of coming to fruition, as critics of hard-right Premier Benjamin Netanyahu accuse him of needlessly prolonging hostilities for political advantage.
True or not, Israel is certainly exploiting the opportunity with merciless logic. With little international condemnation, the Occupied West Bank has been effectively annexed. The same fate clearly awaits Gaza, which the IDF insists on occupying once the war is over (if it ever is), sealing the Strip’s borders and allowing fresh settlements.
If there is ever going to be a state “from the river to the sea”, it will be Israel, not the fantasy Palestine of its extremist supporters. And Hamas will have delivered it.
New Orleans victims were identified yesterday. We will never know the names of the mother and her four children who were killed in the air strike on Jabalia. Anonymous, like tens of thousands others, known only to their grieving families.
Saving lives a tiger feat
Poor, remote Nepal now has more tigers than it can handle, a victim of highly successful campaigning in rich countries. Numbers of these magnificent beasts have quadrupled to 355, but the human death toll from attacks has also increased.
Nepalese Prime Minister Sharma Oli says there are too many, and wants to give half of them to zoos. Twenty are in captivity, at unaffordable cost. Species conservation is vital, but so is human life, which we hear rather less about from the animal rights lobby.