Chanukah will never be the same again.

The Holiday of Lights will, from now on, be filled with sadness, and I will ask my children and grandchildren to never forget Bondi Beach in their future commemorations of the holiday.

My family will light a ninth candle — a special one for Bondi Beach — this year.

Underneath our grief are many questions. Why? How can this happen? What are the causes?

These are difficult questions filled with many complexities. I am not a scholar, psychiatrist or historian but some answers, for me at least, are obvious. I’ll deal with just a few of them.

First and perhaps foremost is the media’s relentless assault on Israel for its role in the war against Hamas. As I have written in many columns on the slanted coverage, hardly a day went by when there was not one story castigating the Jewish state whether it involved criticism from a world leader or emotional videos on TV news stations of Palestinian suffering.

And it was not subtle. Israel was the villain throughout the world.

Meanwhile, the terrorist organization’s charter calls for, not a two-state solution, but for killing every Jew hiding behind a tree or under a rock. That has been embraced by the world, if not overtly, then by its silence and holding Hamas basically blameless for the war.

Let us not forget about the United Nations which was always considered a neutral party by the media when they wrote about the conflict. Neutral? According to UN Watch, a monitoring organization, since 2006, the UN Human Rights Council has adopted 112 resolutions condemning Israel while it turned its sights on Syria 45 times and........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)