Why the focus on Jewish victims?

Question:

When I see the obituaries on the website, all are of the Jewish victims. I value our sense of responsibility for our fellow Jews and internal cohesion in difficult times and I think this is one of the reasons enabling our peoples' existence. Yet, no mention to any obituaries - for instance of one of the numerous Indian victims - is made on the site. I understand it is quite hard to obtain some 190 obituaries and I have seen that you pay respect to all victims of the attacks on the right side of the page, but why not add one or a few non-Jewish obituaries?

Response:

You ask a thoughtful question that deserves a thoughtful answer. Nevertheless, in true Jewish style, before I address it directly, let me ask you back a question--not just a question, but the real, most difficult question in this situation: You ask, "Why do we focus on Jews?" My question is, "Why did the terrorists focus on Jews?"

It's not easy to wrap your head around, so let's take it step by step: Pakistan and India were divided by the British when they left--one country for Muslims, one for Hindus. Everything was clear except for the borders. Understandably, Pakistan and India are not happy. They fight, accrue nuclear arsenal and wave ominous threats at one another.

So far, easy. That's the way the world works. Now:

To make their point, Pakistani terrorists hijack a boat, land on Indian soil with assault rifles and grenades--still making perfect sense, right?--and go kill some Jews.

Hold it. There's over a billion people living in India. There's over 700,000 Christians. Lots of other minorities too. Jews are not just a tiny minority—they're so small, most Indians didn't even know they existed--until now.

Even more puzzling is when you look through history and see, hey, there's a pattern here: Noble Crusaders marched through the Rhine Valley and France to chase the heathen from the Holy Land, and massacred whole communities of Jews along the way. Protestants fought Catholics over freedom of religion, so they killed Jews. Cossacks rose up in revolt against their Polish overlords and wiped entire communities of Jews off the map. The Czar and his ministers were fearful of a popular revolution, and so instigated pogroms to distract the people's anger toward Jews instead. The Germans felt resentment to the rest of Europe for stealing their pride in a nasty war and beating them to the ground, and so took revenge beginning with...you get the rhythm of it.

So it's not surprising that no one bats an eyelid—not CNN, not BBC, not even any of the Indian news services—when Pakistani terrorists target a tiny Jewish outpost in Mumbai to express their anger with India. But the question is why? Why if two nations have a quarrel, is the knee-jerk reaction to go kill some Jews?

The simple answer: Because when nations go to war, it is not against humanity alone, it is against the spark of divinity within us--against G_d. And, as Paul Johnson asserts in his History of the Jews, to the gentile, the Jewish People represent G_d, and G_d means guilt.

To quote the man who tried the hardest in history to destroy us, "Conscience is a Jewish invention, it is a blemish like circumcision."

No one likes feeling guilty. The easiest way out of guilt is to destroy the face that makes you feel guilty. Whether we like it or not, that generally turns out to be us.

Now to your question: Really, we are not interested in any obituaries whatsoever. Personally, I find them depressing. And besides, we are not a news channel, certainly not a social page. Our site is here to shed some Torah light on life on Planet Earth. In this case, the light is not so difficult to discern: The cult of death that scourges Islam today is not an act of frustration against the Zionist entity, American imperialism or Western bourgeoisie culture. It is frankly and simply an assault on the divine spark within every human being. And as far as these particular Muslims were concerned, that spark was best represented by Gaby and Rivky Holtzberg and their guests.

And we agree.