There should be no doubt that the men of violence got what they wanted: a chance to draw blood from Jews and in the most tactile way.

And there is a connection between this style of violence and the history of Hamas.

Back in December 1987, when the first intifada erupted, Israelis like Bibi – I remember watching him on Ted Koppel – reflexively blamed the PLO when in fact by that time the PLO was a spent force. From the gitgo it was the PLO’s rival, the Islamists, who ignited that round of Hamitic violence in the Holy Land.

And what distinguished them, inter alia, was a preference for what in their slang they call “white weapons,” versus assault rifles and building and planting bombs in Jewish markets and movie theaters.

The PLO groups preferred that kind of terrorism versus the Islamists who consciously preferred using knives because of the greater horror they believe they cause; the up-close and primitive stabbing. It was the hands-on approach for Jew-killing which they believed horrified and terrified al-Yahud more than machine guns and bombs.

And there is something to be said for that: it is one thing to kill a man from twenty feet away with a pistol; it is another to plunge a dagger into his chest as was done on that ship.

Likewise the grisly business of suicide bombers of not only slaughtering Jews but deliberately, willfully blowing one’s own body to bloody pieces and smithereens is particularly horrifying.

When the navy boats last Monday morning contacted the Mavi Marmara, one reply was “F. U.” fully stated and another was “Go back to Auschwitz.”

Not the type of words one associates with sisters of mercy who provide food and drink to the homeless refugees after, say, natural disasters.

This reply made a statement not about their fantasized suffering but the Nazi-like hatred of Jews they harbor.

Not that Israelis like Bibi are yet capable to confronting this fact. Like Obama who has deleted Islamic terrorism from his bag of concepts, his vocabulary. Bibi too compared yesterday the civilized behavior of the people aboard the Rachel Corrie with the “violent extremists” on the Mavi Marmara. How noble he sounded in praising these antiJews for their proper deportment when captured versus those “violent extremists.”

Israelis constitute, I think, the first Jewish community history that cannot say the Yiddish words goyim and antisemitn…