SF slow to condemn festival massacre
THE barefoot young woman has her hands cable-tied behind her back, and she’s being forced into a vehicle by an armed Hamas terrorist who’s holding her by the scruff of the neck. She is soaked in blood and there’s no delicate way to put this – you can tell by the location of the worst blood-staining on her tracksuit bottoms that the girl has already been raped.
On Saturday morning, she was among the crowd of young people still dancing after an all-night rave at a peace festival in southern Israel. When the first rockets struck, many of the attendees simply took cover and waited out the attack, since Hamas rockets are a fact of life for Israeli civilians. It was only when the terrorists paraglided into their midst and sprayed the festival-goers with machine guns and grenades that real panic set in, but by then it was too late to escape.
Some parent will have instantly recognised that girl, even though her face is not visible; they’ll know her hair, her familiar shape, her black vest top and her grey pants, most likely the same ones she was wearing when they waved her off to that festival last Friday. And they will also know that thi s was probably their last glimpse of that girl, as she went to her fate at the hands of Islamic terrorists. These are men to whom any woman not covered head to toe is already a legitimate target. To them, rape is a weapon of war.
Haunting
That woman was one of hundreds of hostages, including small babies, captured by Hamas terrorists during that murderous atrocity on Saturday. A 22-yearold Irish citizen, Kim Damti, was also at the rave. She phoned her mother Jennifer, who hails from Portlaoise, to say she and a friend were running to their car to escape the Hamas butchers, but she has not been heard from since.
Her mother’s interview on radio yesterday was haunting. Weeping for her missing girl, Jennifer said she had not slept since that last phone call from Kim, whose only crime was to attend a peace festival. And she added: ‘I didn’t raise my children to hate anyone.’
So an Irish woman is among the victims of this terrorist attack, hundreds of innocent civilians have been murdered, raped, or abducted, and yet it was lunchtime yesterday before the woman who may be our next Taoiseach emerged to condemn it in the most weaselly and grudging manner imaginable. Over the weekend, as those shocking images emerged from Israel, Mary Lou McDonald was posting congratulations to the Irish rugby team, tweeting her support for a referendum on indigenous rights in Australia, and flying the Palestine flag on her social media profile.
On Morning Ireland yesterday, the Palestinian ambassador was crystal clear: she refused several invitations to condemn the slaughter because ‘Hamas is part of the Palestinian people’. ‘Whether you accept it or you don’t accept it,’ she said, ‘you cannot deny it.’ Meanwhile Gerry Adams was posting a picture of a huge Palestinian flag draped on an Irish mountainside. And another Sinn Féin member, Chris Andrews, was shamelessly describing the massacre as Palestine merely ‘defending itself against murder, torture and apartheid’. So, to these two prominent Sinn Féin members, the murderous rapist hauling off that brutalised woman was acting in selfdefence. And this party may be in government in the near future.
When Bryan Dobson asked Ms McDonald for a comment on Andrews’s astonishing post, she claimed she hadn’t seen it. I do not believe that for a second, nor could anyone with half a brain. She knew she was going on to be asked about her party’s response to the attack; of course she saw Andrews’s emetic offering in advance. Yet she refused to disown or condemn her party member’s implicit assertion that this young woman, and Kim Damti and her Portlaoise-born mother, deserved all they got. Though Ms McDonald described the attacks on Israel as ‘truly horrific’, she said the outrage was ‘depressingly predictable’, because of Israel’s repeated breaching of international law.
She could not say that there is never any justification for taking of innocent life, and leave it at that. She spent longer, in that seven-minute interview, condemning Israel than she did criticising her ideological allies in Hamas.
Sympathies
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is deep-rooted and long-running, and there have been atrocities on both sides over the years. But the world should never lose the ability to call out a terrorist attack on unarmed civilians, including the rape, murder and abduction of women and children, no matter where sympathies may lie. It is deeply worrying, given Sinn Féin’s position in the polls, that it is so reluctant to condemn terrorism – and even, in some cases, prepared to endorse or justify it – when the party supports its aims. In her radio interview earlier on, Kim Damti’s mother Jennifer sobbed as she begged the international community to condemn the Hamas terrorist attack without reservation. By lunchtime it was clear she couldn’t even rely on a fellow Irishwoman, Mary Lou McDonald, leader of the country’s most popular political party and a potential Taoiseach, to denounce the horror without a qualification – while a great number of the latter’s party colleagues, and potentially future ministers, made no criticism of Hamas at all when commenting on the attack.