Last Friday, as the world's attention was fixated on the aftermath of Japan's tragic earthquake and tsunami, two masked terrorists cut through the protective fence around the Itamar settlement in the West Bank and snuck into the home of Rabbi Udi Fogel, his wife Ruth and their six children.

Armed with knives, the black-hearted pair found Rabbi Fogel asleep with the couple's three-month-old baby Hadas. Under cover of darkness, they slit Udi's and Hadas's throats as they lay in bed.

Ruth Fogel was in the bathroom when the attack began. When she came out, the duo stabbed and killed her. They then directed their butchery at two of the Fogel's sons, stabbing 11-year-old Yoav and four-year-old Elad in their hearts as they slept.

Miraculously, the killers missed the bedroom in which sons Ro'i (8) and Yishai (2) were sleeping. The couple's 12year-old daughter, Tamar, was also spared because she was visiting a friend's home at the time of the bloody attack. But perhaps "spared" is not the correct word. When she returned home two hours later, Tamar found Yishai, the toddler, standing over his parents' bodies calling for them to wake up.

In a region of the world where gruesome acts of violence seem commonplace, this terror attack stands out for its surreal, almost inhuman brutality. There is a special element of depravity in being able to sink a knife again and again into the flesh of another human, especially a tiny child. Slashing open necks and piercing hearts, on purpose, over many minutes, is more sinister and deranged, more direct and personal, than shooting from afar or even self-detonating.

You really have to want to do it. You have to have worked yourself up into a psychotic fever in which you hate your victims so thoroughly that you convince yourself they are no longer people, but objects, or worse yet demons.

The Itamar massacre is a side of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that I'm guessing none of the sanctimonious, moralizing organizers of Israeli Apartheid Week activities has the guts to show.

All this week, on secure campuses around the country (and worldwide), university students have been pledg-ing their solidarity with the Palestinian cause in festivals of hypocrisy known as Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW). Events are scheduled that, according to planners, "educate people about the nature of Israel as an apartheid system." But I'll bet not one of the IAW events attempts to educate attendees about the vicious slaughter of the Fogel family, except maybe to lay paranoid blame for it on Israeli security forces (i.e., that it was really Mossad agents dressed as Palestinians who committed the murders in order to derail peace talks) or to suggest Israel brought this savagery on itself through its continued oppression of Palestinians and its insistence on building more West Bank settlements of the kind the Fogels resided in.

Last Sunday, some Israelis got hold of pictures of the murder scene that had been released by Israeli officials. They turned them into a YouTube video that was, reportedly, very graphic, but very effective. However, YouTube administrators quickly removed the video claiming it violated the popular site's policy against extremely violent images.

But the images are still available on the website of Israeli National News (http: //bit. ly/i65Sre). Do not view them if you are easily disturbed. They are gruesome. Rabbi Fogel's family consented to their release, though. Part of their motive was to remind the world what Israeli settlers and Israel itself are up against.

The Itamar massacre has set back the peace process by years. No doubt, IAW participants and other Palestinian apologists will blame Israel for the breakdown. But Israel cannot be expected to talk peace when its citizens -even residents of controversial settlements -are under threat of terror attacks such as this.