The Palestinians are a despotic, undemocratic grouping which promotes a religious war against Israel, a democracy, through terror. - Melanie Phillips

I find that Muslims are often allies. Their critique offers a salutary contrast to western indifference and inertia. Muslims rightly condemn the collapse of western moral authority, the failure of nerve that has created our epidemics of crime, drug abuse, family breakdown and promiscuity. They are right to be horrified at the wholesale destruction of the sacred, and the worship instead of consumer choice. They are right to point to the meaninglessness and vacuity of secular society, its arrogance and the paralysis of its institutions. This is, after all, why so many are turning to fundamentalism in Christianity and Judaism as well as Islam.

A continuum links peaceful law-abiding ideological Muslims at one end and murderous jihadists at the other.

Israel has been at war many times. It has experienced many terrorist atrocities and many thousands of rocket attacks. This was something different. Barbarism and depravity against Jews on this scale hasn't been experienced since the Holocaust.
In a country that arose from the ashes of that genocide, the spectacle of Jews being dragged from their homes to be slaughtered, raped or captured, with desperate parents throwing themselves on their children to protect them, was unspeakable. This wasn't simply terrorism. This was a pogrom.