This morning a terrorist sneaked into the bedroom of a 13-year-old girl, Hallel-Yaffa Ariel. He murdered young Hallel in cold blood. A picture of her blood stained room is almost too hard to see. There’s a teddy bear still on her bed, a red beanbag chair, some pictures on the wall, shoes tightly packed in a bin next to her bunk bed. Why would any person do this?
You
don’t murder a sleeping child for peace. You don’t slit a little girl’s throat
to protest a policy you don’t like.
You do this because you’ve been brainwashed. You’ve
been brainwashed by a warped ideology that teaches you that this child isn’t
human.
We will not let
barbarism defeat humanity.
There’s
no middle ground between beautiful Hallel and her unspeakably evil murderer.
Today,
each of us is going to fight back.
I
ask you to walk into your child’s bedroom before they go to sleep. I ask you to
hug them. I ask you to kiss them. Teach them that the values that Hallel’s
murderer most detested – freedom, diversity, pluralism – will never die; we’ll
always hold them dear. Tell them that we will never let fear, evil and terror
triumph; that we will always stand for justice. And this is how we will fight
back. We fight back first by fighting back, fighting the terrorists, fighting
their backers, fighting those who incite for such murder, whether in Hebron or
in Orlando, or in Berlin, or in Ankara, or in Belgium, anywhere. We fight back
by making sure that our collective moral compass doesn’t waver even a
millimeter.
Today
we will cherish Hallel’s memory. We will defend and honor her dignity by
redoubling our efforts around the world to defeat the scourge of radical
Islamist terror.
May
Hallel’s memory forever be a blessing.
