As many have already noted, the spree of recent Islamist terror attacks
across Europe feel reminiscent of some of the Palestinian attacks that
Israeli civilians have been enduring for decades. And as Europeans
confront this wave of violence, they are fast adopting the same means
that Israelis have been forced take when trying to defend themselves.
Yesterday, when an Afghan migrant and Islamic State devotee in Germany
began attacking commuters on a busy train, he was quickly shot and
killed by security. Similarly, the horrific truck attack last week in
Nice was only brought to an end when the French police shot and killed
Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who also appears to have been linked with
ISIS.
When
comparable knife attacks and car rammings have happened in Israel,
security forces there acted similarly. Of course, on many occasions,
Israel’s border police and army have managed to shoot and merely disable
assailants. But when that has not been possible, Palestinian attackers
have been shot and killed in an effort to save the lives of Israeli
civilians in immediate harm’s way. It would seem morally obvious that
sometimes this is what has to be done to bring a terror assault to the
swiftest possible conclusion.
Yet Sweden’s Foreign Minister Margot
Wallstrom had an objection to Israelis defending themselves in this
way. In January, when allegations were made in the Swedish parliament
that Israel was perpetrating “extrajudicial executions” of Palestinian
attackers, Wallstrom gave credence to these allegations. “It is vital
that there is a thorough, credible investigation into these deaths in
order to clarify and bring about possible accountability,” she said. By
the same standard, we should now expect to hear Sweden’s foreign
ministry call upon their French and German neighbors to undertake
investigations into the circumstances under which the German train and
Nice attackers were killed.
Wallstrom’s talk of bringing about
“possible accountability” is especially galling. The notion that it is
members of Israel’s security forces who should be interrogated and
punished for acting to neutralize a terror threat is an unspeakable
moral inversion. [...]
Nevertheless, the question is not one of
whether Wallstrom’s comments about Israel were acceptable; we already
knew that they were not. Rather, the question here is whether the
Swedish foreign ministry is going to be consistent because a standard
has now been set. As such, Margot Wallstrom has a choice on her hands.
Either she can come out and call for equivalent investigations into the
actions of the German and French police—and provoke popular and
diplomatic fury from across Europe—or she could not hold European
countries to the same standard she holds Israel to, and in doing so
confirm that she operates a bigoted and discriminatory attitude toward
the Jewish state.
When Wallstrom made her comments in January many
will have assumed the latter to have been the case. But if she cares
to, recent events have now provided her with an opportunity to prove
otherwise.
No comments:
Post a Comment