By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO — Witnesses said the 24-year old man on the scooter pulled up to the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse, France. It was just before 8 a.m.—a new morning in the rustic community. Students were arriving for class, chatting, joking, and thinking of their sunrise prayers. Suddenly, the man began blasting away, at one point even charging on to the school grounds and chasing screaming, horrified students inside the doomed academy.
“He shot at everything he could see, children and adults, and some children were chased into the school,” local prosecutor Michel Valet told reporters. [New York Post] The dead were Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, 30, his two sons Aryeh, three, and Gavriel Yissacher, six. The 8-year old daughter of the school’s principal, Miriam Montenago, was also executed. One witness said the gunman shot one of the children in the back and then went up to her body and shot her again to make sure she was dead. A house of learning and devotion in France was once again converted into a scene of Jewish carnage. This was the gunman’s follow-up to the murders of three French servicemen (so ironically, two of them Arab) a few days ago in name of jihad.
With unbelievable callousness, the shooter, Mohammed Merah, apparently videotaped his school massacre with a camera strapped to his own body. At the time of this writing, he was holed up in a Toulouse apartment as French police were trying to figure out how to capture him. Merah, of Algerian descent, with ties to both Al Qaeda and the Taliban, has been given the opportunity to spout off his anti-Semitic and vociferously racist views; he is neither remorseful nor reluctant to continue firing his .45-caliber and has wounded at least two policemen.
We are almost getting used to these bloody outrages on the part of Islamic terrorists; this subculture of genocide and madness informs our daily lives with security measures, routine tension, airport stress, and a general sense of foreboding. But we Jews are having a dreadful time getting used to the fact that the gory shadow of genocide is now hovering over our children in Europe and elsewhere. From the El Al terminal at LAX to the streets and schoolhouses of Mumbai, Jewish children and adults are being earmarked for specific brutality in the name of a pejorative version of Islam.
The New York Times reported that a leader of French Jewry, a most besieged community that suffered grievously from Nazi sympathizers during World War II, met with the president, Nicholas Sarkozy. Richard Prasquier, the national head of Crif, the Jewish organization, said: “It is absolutely excluded that we confuse this character — and the Islamist, jihadist, Al -Qaeda-linked movement he represents — and the Islam of France, which is a religion like all other religions.”
Would that someone in the Islamic community truly stepped forward and declared unequivocally that Judaism is a faith worthy of the same respect. While we bury our dead in Jerusalem, the liturgy of Mohammed is also bleeding to death.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may be reached at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com