Funny how none of the articles
about the murder of Dahlia Lemkus who was stabbed near Alon Shvut last
night speak about Dahlia or her family, how no reporter had the
curiosity to find out about her. She was killed in the afternoon so the
reporters had all evening to question their contacts in Tekoa.
Instead, they practice a kind of obscurantism, restricting our knowledge of the victim. (Curious that the word obscurantism is
derived from a dispute between intellectuals and the German monks who
wanted to burn Jewish books, like the Talmud, in the 16th century to
obscure Jewish culture and learning.) In the New York Times,
the reporter tells you about the terrorist who is from Hebron, how he
was in an Israeli jail for five years for a firebombing. The reporter
quotes his Facebook page: “I’ll be a thorn in the gullet of the Zionist
project to Judaize Jerusalem.” We learn nothing about 26 year old
Dahlia, who was just getting started in life after finishing college,
studying occupational therapy so that she could have a job where she
could help people who were sick or infirm or disabled to live in a
fuller way.
They don’t tell you how she loved to bake with
her mother, the two of them bringing rich, luscious cakes to parties
and the way she spoke English with an accent — but not a Hebrew accent —
a South African accent because her parents made aliyah from there
thirty years ago. They don’t tell you how she went to synagogue every
Sabbath and smiled at the people in her row before she prayed. And they
don’t tell you how she had to hitchhike to get to her job working with
children in Kiryat Gat or that she was the main volunteer at Yad Sarah
in Tekoa which lends medical equipment like wheelchairs to those who are
sick or injured. They don’t tell you how she liked to help brides look
beautiful by doing their makeup for them before their weddings.
They don’t care that Dahlia’s father Nachum
drives the ambulance in Tekoa. Day and night he is called on to make the
drive to Jerusalem, and that Dahlia’s mother cares tenderly for the
elderly.
You will never learn from the articles that,
when a neighbor had to go to the hospital with a sick child, Dahlia
stayed with the other young children all night and insisted that they
not pay her. The articles would never tell you that she was the one who
cooked the food for her brother Haggai’s bar mitzvah a month ago, fried
fish, salad and pancakes.
No, they don’t want you to know what a kind,
giving, loving young woman she was on the cusp of her adult life,
looking towards marriage and creating her own family.
Instead the newspapers show a photo of the
terrorist and tell us that the Palestinian leadership says that it is
normal and natural to run over a young woman and then stab her to death
so that her blood runs like a red cape into the street. Normal and
natural. An act of resistance. When the Palestinian leadership calls for
their people to take a knife and find Jews to murder, and calls it
natural and normal, we have entered the realm of unadulterated evil.
Dahlia embodied its opposite and that fact shouldn’t be obscured from
the world.
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