THE HOUR; Ideological Vacuousness

Forward, August, 2005 by Fein, Leonard

Fein, Leonard

Forward

08-12-2005

The massacre at Columbine was in 1999. Eden Natan-Zada was only 13 back then, so he'd have been too young to join in the killing. And, of course, he was in the wrong place. Where he lived -- first in the coastal Israeli city of Rishon Lezion, then evidently in the West Bank settlement of Tapuach -- there is ostensibly an ideology that encourages the murders he committed inside a bus in Shfaram last week. But the so-called ideology is no more than a translucent patina that does not conceal the hate it overlays. There will be official inquiries and investigations. There will be protest marches. The day will live, for a time, in infamy. But we learn very little from what this 19-year-old deserter from the Israeli military did,...