By Ryan Jones
Mar 05, 2006
Disregarding several key facts surrounding an attack on Nazareth's Basilica of the Annunciation, local Arab leaders have taken advantage of the incident to further display their disloyalty by inciting greater hatred against their Jewish countrymen.
As local Christians were participating in a Lent service Friday, Haim and Violet Habibi, accompanied by their daughter Odelia, entered the church with a baby carriage containing firecrackers and several small gas canisters and detonated their charge.
It was soon after revealed that the couple had recently had their youngest child taken from them by authorities due to their mental instability, and that the attack was an obvious attempt to gain attention rather than religiously or nationally-motivated aggression.
Photos in local newspapers testified to the fact the blast was not even powerful enough to destroy the baby carriage.
Far more destructive were the rioting Arab mobs that showed up at the scene presumably to lynch the Habibi family, but that had to make due with injuring 13 police officers and burning, overturning and otherwise damaging vehicles in the area.
Naturally, none of this mattered to Arab Knesset members and Muslim officials as they laid into the "Zionist regime" under which they have enjoyed far greater freedoms than any Arab population in the Middle East.
Failing to do his homework, Arab MK Mohammed Barakeh reacted:
"Such an act is proof of the fact that radical right-wing and settler terror groups feel they are free to perform their crimes, both in the territories and in Israel, against the Arab population."
Had Barakeh dug just a little deeper he would have realized that far from being a radical rightist or settler, Habibi is at least a nominal supporter of the "Palestinian cause" who in the past sought asylum in the Palestinian Authority believing Israel was out to get him and his family.
Prominent Arab MK Azmi Bishara chimed in:
"It is unclear whether this crime is based on a religious or racist background, because it's the same in Israel, and we don't find it strange that such phenomena break out due to the racist culture in this country."
Ignorning the fact that both Violet and Odelia Habibi are Christians, Arab MK and former adviser to Yasser Arafat, Ahmed Tibi insisted the attack was the result of a Jewish "sickness of racism and hatred of Arabs, Muslims and Christians alike."
Repeating Tibi's error, Patriarch Atallah Hanna, official spokesman of the Orthodox Church in the Holy Land, condemned what he called:
"The terrorist fascist attack that was carried out by an extremist racist Jewish gang against the Church of Annunciation."
And a statement by the Higher Israeli Arab Monitoring Committee read:
"The Arab public cannot absorb such blows, and we warn the leaders of the state against another attempt at harming the Arab public."
Ironically, the accusations leveled against Israel lay at the base of the decades-old Islamic terror campaign being waged against the country's Jewish population. But the frequent attacks on Israel's Jews fail to elicit similar responses from these representatives of democracy.