…Today in JPost their estimable Herb Keinon reckoned that we are entering the second round of this fighting and the international leeway and legitimacy that Israel enjoyed at the beginning, following the triple murder of our boys, has been depleted.

Perhaps. But I think he wrote this before news of the decapitation of James Foley. For sure, Israel was thoroughly smeared with the blood of innocents before the cease-fire but I think Israel could profit from yesterday’s horror in Iraq if only it were capable of doing what it has never done: and that is to dismiss Palestinian Nationalism for the hoax that it is and turn the spotlight on HAMAS as a soul-sister organization of ISIL. Israel needs its ambassadors abroad to link in the mind HAMAS with ISIL for HAMAS became famous through suicide bombing every bit as grisly and gruesome as this latest decapitation by a Muslim of a Western infidel. For I don’t see much aesthetic or moral daylight between cutting off Foley’s head, and exploding oneself on a crowded rush-hour bus in Jerusalem which explosion blows the heads off several Jews at the same time.

I remember that image well, never actually shown in photo but described in words by a policeman who boarded such a blasted bus at the Patt Junction in Jerusalem in which he said the people who had been sitting in the front row, like two abreast on either side of the center aisle, were still sitting there as if nothing had happened only they had no heads. They had been blown off their shoulders and were in the back of the bus. Israel needs to make clear that our self-defense against HAMAS is the same as fighting al-Qaida and ISIL…