Last week, a man named Gary Conrad began harassing people at a Manhattan grocery store; he then pulled a knife on the police officers who had been called to the scene. When he didn’t respond to their order to put the knife down, the police shot and killed him. Had this happened in Israel, writes Judith Bergman, there would be outcry over the “disproportionate response”:
Conrad had displayed “aggressive and belligerent” behavior at a grocery store by “swearing” and he had threatened police with a knife. For that he was shot nine times. . . .
Had this taken place in Israel, and had this man not been called Gary Conrad, but Muhammad, and had he not been merely an inebriated loon but a terrorist out to slash Jews, international outrage would have poured forth in torrents from the front page of every single news outlet and the mouth of every opinion maker worth his salt. . . .
So far, [however], not a single news report has questioned the judgment of the NYPD. . . . Somehow . . . liberals’ hearts do not bleed for a fellow New Yorker like Gary Conrad. Why might that be? My guess is that liberals, much like everybody else, do not like it when knife-wielding men roam their neighborhoods. It is one thing to sit safely behind your screen thousands of miles away from the Middle East, but it is something else entirely to have someone waving a knife at your neighborhood store, whether that person is a terrorist or just a criminal.
More about: Crime, Israel & Zionism, Knife intifada, Media, Terrorism