How do you get a celebration cooking in Gaza? According to Ynet News, slaughtering an Israeli family in Itamar brings out the joy in Palestinians — and not for the first time. Gazans flocked to the streets and handed out candy to celebrate the brutal stabbing deaths of a five members of a family, including a three-month-old infant:

Gaza residents from the southern city of Rafah hit the streets Saturday to celebrate the terror attack in the West Bank settlement of Itamar where five family members were murdered in their sleep, including three children.

Residents handed out candy and sweets, one resident saying the joy “is a natural response to the harm settlers inflict on the Palestinian residents in the West Bank.”

According to one report, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade — an arm of Fatah, of which Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas is a member — claimed responsibility for the butchery:

According to an unverified report, Fatah’s military wing – the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades – claimed responsibility for the attack. A group spokesman told a Palestinian news agency that a terror cell infiltrated the settlement of Itamar and committed the attack.

The spokesperson stressed that the attack “came as a response to Israel’s continues hostile policy toward the Palestinian people.”

Philip Klein notes that Palestinian media has a much different take on the, er, incident:

“I don’t believe that the incident in Itamar is an act of resistance, but rather an act by individuals whom we condemn, in the event it was carried out by Palestinians. Stabbing children in their sleep is not a heroic act but rather that of the heartless, like some of the occupation soldiers and settlers, who murder children,” Hafez Barghouti, editor-in-chief of Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, wrote on Sunday.

He added that the “real murderers in Itamar are the zealous settlers and anyone who burned a tree, vandalized the cemetery in Awarta, forced out the residents of Khirbet Yanun, took control of a plot of land or robbed an olive harvest …. The act at Itamar was a message to the occupation and to the world … whose meaning is clear – the occupation must go.”

Ah, yes, the real murderers are those who supposedly rob an olive harvest, not the ones who actually murder people. How … Orwellian.

Meanwhile, Jeff Dunetz finds that Western media aren’t much better at reporting the terrorist attack and brutal murder:

CNN refused to label the murder as an act of terrorism by the Palestinians, desipte the fact that the IDF had already called it an act of Palestinian Terror. …  The CNN report stated:

“Five members of an Israeli family were killed in the West Bank early Saturday morning in what the Israeli military is calling a ‘terror attack.'”
The report went on to say: “According to a military spokeswoman, an intruder entered the Israeli settlement of Itamar near the northern West Bank city of Nablus around 1 am, made his way into a family home and killed two parents and their three children.”

The IDF’s official statement had already noted that forces were searching for a “terrorist” and not an “intruder” as CNN reported. But that didn’t matter to CNN who wanted to give their cleansed version of what happened. The terrorist was also referred to as an “assailant” later in the CNN report.

The Paper of Record?  Much the same:

Never one to show Jews as victims (they even buried accounts of the Holocaust until after the war) , the NY Times did its best to join in on the dehumanization of the Fogel’s with a headline declaring:

Suspecting Palestinians, Israeli Military Hunts for Killers of 5 West Bank SettlersNotice “Suspecting Palestinians” and “Five Settlers.” By the time they wrote the article the NY Times knew there were Palestinians involved, the evidence included muddy footprints that lead directly to the nearest Palestinian village and a statement by the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades saying “hey we did it.”

Both Philip and Jeff include this video (via Big Peace), set aptly to music from  Schindler’s List, that gives graphic accounts of the slaughter of the Fogels, including the infant Hadas.  When I say “graphic,” I mean it, so don’t play this if you’re at all squeamish.  It will likely enrage you — or at least it will make you question what kind of people would celebrate this by eating candy in the streets.  Answer: The same kind of people who celebrated the massacre of 3,000 people in the US on 9/11, and the very same people that the US insists should have their own independent state.  See if this video convinces you of that wisdom.