En israelsk rett dømte nylig den atten år gamle palestineren Hakim Awad til fem livstidsdommer for å ha knivdrept like mange medlemmer av den jødiske familien Fogel i Itamar — den yngste av dem, datteren Hadas, bare tre måneder gammel (de grusomme bildene som dokumenterer forbrytelsen finnes her). Da nyheten om ugjerningen i sin tid ble kjent, avstedkom den spontan feiring blant palestinere. Saken mot den medsammensvorne, som ifølge Jerusalem Post i likhet med Hakim Awad var tilknyttet Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), kommer opp siden.

I en artikkel hos Ynetnews skriver Il Foglios Giulio Meotti at Awad under rettsforhandlingene hele tiden smilte uanstrengt til kameraet, viste V-tegn, og sa at han ikke angret på det han hadde gjort, en opptreden som etter Meottis oppfatning sier mer om araberes hat mot jøder enn alle bøker som er skrevet om temaet. Han sammenligner denne gleden ved å drepe med blant andre Beslan-terroristene, nazistene og Røde Khmer, og legger til at mange kvier seg for å se i øynene at det er tale om ondskap:

The Fogels’ massacre in Itamar, where two Palestinians murdered babies as deliberately and unabashedly as very few other than the Nazis and Khmer Rouge ever had, has not been deciphered by our writers and intellectuals. It’s because we have been told that “they hate us” is the language of xenophobes, the illiberal, the intolerant; that genocidal anti-Semitism was buried in the ashes of Auschwitz; that we have to be polite, sanitized and self-critical.

A seductive combination of post-colonial white guilt mixed with liberal condescension has dulled our moral senses and made us blind to Awad’s smile; a smirk that conveys unleashed hatred, contempt, physical aggression, the desire to expel, to destroy, and to eliminate the Jews.

Just like the 9/11 tape, Awad’s smile tells us about the obscene level of current-day anti-Jewish hatred – comparable to the worst days of the Nazis in the early 1930s – more than all the shelves of books written on the Middle East.

Awad resembles other «smiling assassins.» For example, the mastermind of the Bali terrorist attacks, Amrozi bin Nurhasyim, who has been called “the laughing bomber.” In 2005, a video footage was released of the Beslan school siege, showing the terrorist leader laughing as hundreds of pupils, their families and teachers were herded at gunpoint into the school gym rigged with explosives.

It’s also the smile of Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief in southeastern France from 1942 to 1944, who laughed all the time when the Jewish victims described the torture at court in 1997. In 2007, a photo album containing 116 rare photographs of senior Nazi officials at the Auschwitz concentration camp was made public by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Josef Mengele, the camp doctor notorious for his medical experiments, is smiling while the gas chambers are operating in Birkenau.

Germany perpetrated the Holocaust not because it had the means to do so, but because its leaders engendered the will to do so. This totalitarian, robotic willingness also lies in Hakim Awad’s smile.