"You Shouldn't Have Worn That Dress."

When a terrorist speaks, you must take care to distinguish between what he says and what he actually means. For example, a terrorist may savagely denounce the Israeli occupation of Palestine. But beyond the rhetoric, his words amount to little more than:

“You shouldn’t have worn that dress.”

Not that I equate terrorists with rapists. Far from it. I clearly recognize that while today’s fanatical Islamist finds it entirely virtuous to indiscriminately decapitate Jews and Christians, he finds it utterly unconscionable to look upon the face of any woman besides his wife. By attributing this attitude to the terrorist, I mean only to express the fact that in his sociopathic megalomania, he exploits the mere presence of innocent people peacefully tending their affairs to justify his homicidal indignation.

And the fault always falls at the victim’s corpse. If only he had not been a Jew; if only he had not lived where he did; if only he had not had the audacity to assume that he could walk the streets in broad daylight unmolested; if only he had never been born, his remains would not litter the sidewalk or his severed head would not lie rotting on the floor.

“You shouldn’t have worn that dress.”

In preparation for the upcoming release of Steven Spielberg’s historical drama Munich, I have been reading One Day In September, by Simon Reeve. Reeve’s book recounts in detail how eight Palestinian guerillas infiltrated the athletes’ quarters during the 1972 Munich Olympics and took eleven Israeli team members hostage. The terrorists ultimately executed all eleven, but in the course of the initial confrontation they “only” killed two. Apparently the Israeli wrestling coach had objected to being held for ransom at gunpoint, and forcibly resisted; one of his captors shot him dead in the street. According to actual “Black September” conspirator Abu Daoud, “One of the athletes, a heavily built man, tried to grab one of the [terrorist’s] guns, and so he was forced to shoot him, otherwise they would all have died. It’s logical to shoot someone in self-defense.” Self-defense. On the part of a machine-gun-toting assassin detaining an unarmed man against his will. If only the victim had just recognized his own culpability.

“You shouldn’t have worn that dress.”

In October, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad described Israel as a “disgraceful blot” that should be “wiped off the map.” Yesterday he denied the Holocaust, calling it nothing more than a pretext for European powers to force Zionism on the Arab world. Many critics believe that Israel has brought such hostility on itself, yet Islamist plans for Jewish genocide predate the 1948 establishment of modern Israel. Haj Mohammed Amin al-Hussein, the “Grand Mufti” or Sunni ruler of Palestine from 1921-1948, spent part of World War Two in Germany with Hitler, trying to persuade him to bring his “final solution” to the Middle East. At that time there were no occupied territories, no West Bank and Gaza Strip, just Jewish immigrants who in fleeing one Holocaust nearly staggered into another. Still, terrorists and their sympathizers insist on what they have reiterated for over 50 years:

“You shouldn’t have worn that dress.”