“In Israel, as in France, terror is terror,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting Nov. 15. “Behind it is radical Islam and its desire to destroy its victims.” Netanyahu’s message was quickly picked up by social media and the public discourse in the aftermath of the murderous Paris terror attacks Nov. 13: Here’s your proof, spelled out with the blood of at least 129 dead and hundreds injured, that we are all victims of vicious Islamist terror, that those who fired at innocents in the heart of the French capital are the same Muslims who stab innocents in the heart of the Israeli capital, and they all have the same goal: to destroy anyone who is not part of extreme Islam.
The message that “terror is terror is terror” runs like a thread throughout Netanyahu’s demagogic rhetoric. In a statement to the cameras at the start of the Cabinet meeting, he spoke in the same breath about the Palestinian who shot dead a father and son (Ya'akov and Netanel Litman) near the settlement of Otniel in the Hebron Hills Nov. 13, and about Europe becoming a terror target several hours later.