ALL PERPETRATORS OF extreme political brutality tend to react to criticism from their own side in exactly the same way, just with different nouns. It’s like a special edition of Mad Libs (an American fill-in-the-blank word game) for violent radicals:

[Person on My Side] criticizes us for [Atrocity by Our Side]! But where was [Person on My Side]’s condemnation of [Atrocity by the Other Side]?!?

For instance, here’s Ayman al-Zawahiri, now head of al Qaeda, responding in 2008 to criticism by his one-time mentor that al Qaeda’s violence was a misinterpretation of the doctrine of jihad:

This is what I have to say in response. … Why did [my fellow Muslims] condemn what happened in America but we heard no one condemn what America did to the Sudanese factory? … What about the almost daily starving of the Iraqi people and the attacks on them? What about the sieges and attacks on the Muslim state of Afghanistan?

Exactly the same pattern is found in an official statement from ISIS after the recent massacres in Brussels, which attempts (in broken English) to justify the murders there to other Muslims:

We have also seen some evil “scholars” … quoting the textual evidences out of context. Today, we shall tackle this topic. … [They] cry and mourn on the death of the Kuffar [non-believers], while the death hundreds of muslim men, women, old and children dying daily in the airstrikes don’t effect them in anyway.

Obviously this is lots of fun, because now Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to play.

Sen. Patrick Leahy and 10 House members wrote to Secretary of State John Kerry this week asking him to assess the credibility of reports that U.S. military aid to Israel and Egypt might violate U.S. law prohibiting such aid to governments that commit any “gross violation of human rights.” Netanyahu responded in a brief, official written statement: