JERUSALEM — Israel’s leaders on Tuesday strongly censured the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, for remarks made a day earlier in which she was perceived as having equated the murders of three children at a Jewish school in France with the death of children during the fighting in Gaza.What is distorted is Ms. Ashton's thinking.
She spoke of remembering “young people who have been killed in all sorts of terrible circumstances — the Belgian children having lost their lives in a terrible tragedy and when we think of what happened in Toulouse today, when we remember what happened in Norway a year ago, when we know what is happening in Syria, when we see what is happening in Gaza and in different parts of the world — we remember young people and children who lose their lives,” she said, according to a transcript of the speech distributed by the European Union.
Ms. Ashton’s spokesman issued a statement of clarification on Tuesday, following the criticism, saying that her words had been “grossly distorted” and that she had not intended to draw any parallel.
She mentions five circumstances in which children are murdered:
1) France, in which children were targeted and murdered for out of sheer hatred
2) Beslan, in which children were targeted and murdered out of sheer hatred
3) Belgium, in which children were targeted and murdered out of sheer hatred
4) Syria, where children are being incidentally killed as part of a larger political conflict
5) Gaza, where children are being incidentally killed as part of a larger political conflict.
Is not murder, as the result of sheer hatred, in a completely different class, than death as the result of collateral damage in the case of war?
Of course it is.
The only reason Ms. Ashton brought up Syria, was so she could support bringing up Gaza, and thereby draw a false moral equivalence between the purposeful murder of Jews and the accidental murder of Palestinian children in Gaza.
She is an anti-Semite. Simple as that.