Leftists are far more alarmed by Israel’s response to the stabbings than they are by the stabbings themselves. They’ve castigated Israel for putting more soldiers on the streets and for making it easier for citizens to buy guns (nothing freaks out the left more than a Jew with a gun). They seem to expect Israel to leave its citizens open to attack. 

Echoing Haaretz writer Rogel Alpher, who wrote a demented column expressing his surprise that a Palestinian has never grabbed “a saw or a hammer and murdered me”, some Western radicals are not only glorifying the stabbings but are condemning those who have the temerity to protect themselves from being stabbed. Why won’t Jews let themselves be killed?

It’s so depraved. Whatever you thought of the PLO’s guerrilla activity in the 1970s, these stabbings are clearly very different. It’s anti-Semitism. That some Westerners are trying to present it as something else — a natural outburst of despair — says more about their busted moral compasses than it does about what’s happening in the Middle East.

Strip away the euphemisms, pick apart the talk of a “knife intifada”, and there’s no escaping the fact — the horrific fact — that some Westerners are defending the stabbing to death of people for being Jewish.