Photo: Elders of Ziyon.

We mentioned the implicit moral equivalence by Jodi Rudoren in The New York Times between the (then) kidnapping of Naftali Frankel, a boy who was simply trying to get home, and the IDF killing rock-throwing teen combatant Mohammed Dudeen, who sneaked out of his house just to attack Israeli soldiers.

Rudoren denied that she was making any moral equivalence, but the article was written in such a way that it is impossible to get any other impression.

Jeremy Ben-Ami of J-Street, the purportedly “pro-peace, pro-Israel” organization, went much further in a stomach-turning post on his site:

The New York Times this week ran a moving, but difficult, article about two mothers, Rachel Fraenkel and Aida Abdel Aziz Dudeen. It was written before the discovery of the body of Rachel’s 16-year-old son, Naftali, one of the three murdered teenagers. “I was praying maybe he did something stupid and irresponsible,” Ms. Fraenkel recalled thinking when police came to her door at 4 a.m., “but I know my boy isn’t stupid, and he isn’t irresponsible.”

A few miles away in the West Bank town of Dura, Aida also tried to stop her 15-year-old Mohammed from doing something stupid and irresponsible. She locked the door of the family home to stop him from going out to confront Israeli soldiers after days or house searches and arrests. He got out anyway by jumping out the window and was shot dead, with the key still under Aida’s pillow, when soldiers opened fire on a group of young Palestinians hurling stones at them.

Ben-Ami, in his zeal to say that a boy trying to get a ride home is the same as a terrorist-in-training who goes out of his way to perform acts of violence, loses his reading comprehension skills. Rachel Fraenkel knew her son wasn’t irresponsible; Aida Dudeen knew her son was irresponsible.

To moral midgets like Ben-Ami, their deaths are equivalent.

Ben-Ami is equating a properly raised boy who was killed because he was a Jew to a wannabe terrorist who turned himself into a combatant, going out of his way to attack an army. To him, both are equally tragic. And this is after he already knew that Frankel had been brutally murdered.

He then approvingly goes on to further prove that he is a morally corrupt person:

Times correspondent Jodi Rudoren succinctly summed up the gulf between the sides in the way they look at these twin tragedies. “Most Israelis see the missing teenagers as innocent civilians captured on their way home from school, and the Palestinians who were killed as having provoked soldiers. Palestinians, though, see the very act of attending yeshiva in a West Bank settlement as provocation, and complain that the crackdown is collective punishment against a people under illegal occupation.”

As President Obama memorably said in his speech to young Israelis in Jerusalem last year,we must try to see the world through the eyes of the other side.