A weekend of antisemitic violence

A bomb exploded in Tel Aviv Sunday, killing 1 and injuring 20. Al Aqsa we-make-Martyrs Brigades claimed that one. Arafat, as usual, blamed Israel (not in the sense that Israel provoked the bombing, but in the sense that Israel really did it).

A young woman was attacked on RER D (a Paris suburban train) on Friday morning. Six young men armed with knives first robbed her, then claimed that she was Jewish, which she incidentally wasn't, and proceeded to cut tufts of her hair, cut up her clothes, draw swastikas on her stomach with a magic marker and throw her baby out of the carriage (out of the baby carriage, luckily, not the train carriage).

Now all the country is outraged, politicians and various religious leaders are all competing in expressing their outrage, half of the police are looking for the thugs and the other half is patrolling RER D, apparently in case the thugs are still there.

A Jewish cynic in me says that the degree of outrage is so high precisely because the woman is not Jewish and suddenly a lot of goyim who felt they were safe from antisemitic violence realized that they really aren't, but the Jewish cynic might well be wrong, since an attack on a young mother with a baby by 6 armed thugs would generally attract more attention than, say, an attack on a teenage boy by 6 unarmed classmates.

Most of the public figures expressing their outrage are also condemning the other passengers for doing nothing. Much as I would like to encourage people to interfere with attacks on random people in public transportation - WTF do they expect the other passengers to do against 6 armed thugs? Read them a sermon on dire consequences of ethnic hatred in a multicultural society? Use harsh language? Kung fu? Pull out their own knives? Shoot? Pretty much the only thing one could do under the circumstances is shoot. The obvious obstacles to that is that in civilized societies (yes, this uncludes the USA) people rarely sit in the subway with a loaded gun, that you have to be a fairly good shot to incapacitate 6 people with the 8 or 9 bullets that you can fit into a normal gun, and you won't have time to reload, that you cannot predict what the other 5 will do after you'd shot the first one, and the possible things they can do include pulling out 5 guns, that you'll have to explain your behavior to police and the courts afterwards, and they might not like it, and that all this shooting in an enclosed space is likely to injure bystanders and somewhat damage everyone's ears.