Rules Protect our Values

What separates us from out enemies-ISIS, Hamas, and all the terrorists the Palestinian Authority encourages and praises, is that we value human life, all human life. We protect the value we place on human life with rules and laws, both international and national. It is these laws and rules that prohibit the killing of attackers who have already been subdued.

Last week a soldier violated those rules and killed a terrorist who had already been subdued. I shed no tears for the loss of a terrorist who tried to murder my brothers in the IDF, and I do feel sorry for the soldier in question. But the facts remain the same. The rules of engagement were violated, and the IDF and the Prime Minister are acting appropriately in response to the incident.

I want to be one of those who accuse our government and media of turning against a brave soldier and siding with a terrorist. After all, the soldiers of the IDF are all that stand between us and a massacre the Jewish people haven’t seen in more than seventy years, and the terrorist was one of those people who wanted to carry out said massacre of our people. We have already seen leftists and European politicians try to deny us our right to self-defense by accusing our country, soldiers, and even our civilians of carrying out ‘executions’ of their attackers.

The vast majority of deaths of terrorists during the so-called ‘stabbing intifada’ have been legitimate. But when one isn’t, it has to be investigated and denounced. Not because the terrorist deserves it. If he had been killed by the first bullet that struck him it would have been exactly what he deserved. It has to be be investigated and denounced because we have rules and laws, and without those rules and laws our values become meaningless.

People without rules of engagement, without a sense of the value of human life, are the people who stab tourists in Tel Aviv, who blow up pizza parlors and Seder tables, who launch rockets randomly at civilians while hiding behind their own civilians, who kill hundreds in Paris and thousands in Syria, and who gun down their own coworkers in California.

That is not us. It cannot be us. And because the government and the IDF are willing to speak out and act when violations occur, it still is not us.