Many people lack a factual understanding of events in our region because the media report them inadequately. We blog here because our daughter Malki, murdered at the age of 15 in a restaurant massacre in Jerusalem, was a victim of jihadist hatred and barbarism. For jihadism and terrorism to end in Israel, New York, Madrid, London and everywhere else, people first need to understand the scale on which it is happening and why. This ongoing war is killing us.
From Israel National News, an on-duty Israel Police officer was stabbed in Jerusalem's Old City Thursday afternoon.
The attack on the woman is being treated as a terror attack. Her injuries were relatively mild (for a stabbing); she was brought to Jerusalem's Shaare Zedek Medical Center for treatment.
The knifer was apprehended after being wrestled to the ground (not shot, not beaten to a pulp) and taken into custody by other officers at the scene. Israel's Channel 13 News shows a video clip [here] and says the attacker is a Palestinian Arab boy of thirteen.
Thirteen. Yet another weaponized child. A life incomprehensibly cheapened, and in danger of being wasted before it gets underway.
Referring to this child assailant, Times of Israel says he approached a cluster of officers at the Temple Mount’s Chain Gate (in Hebrew: Sha'ar Hashalshelet), above the Western Wall area, around 4:00 pm. He pulled out a knife and in the customary way attempted to stab anyone he could, indiscriminately. Any Jew would do.
We expect he will now become another poster child for the irresponsible human rights industry's pleas for Israel to stop arresting children. Listening, Amnesty?
A day earlier, Wednesday, an Israeli woman of about twenty was stabbed in another act of Arab-on-Israel terrorism near the busy Maccabim/Shilat Junction on Route 443. That's the major highway that runs between Jerusalem and the airport.
The website of i24Newsreports that the woman was standing at a bus stop which is adjacent to the main entrance to the city of Modi’in. For what it's worth, the bus stop is inside the Green Line which is frequently - and totally misleadingly - called the 1967 border. (It's simply the 1949 armistice line, nothing more.) The Arabb news reports we have seen tell their readers that this was an attack on settlers in some occupied place. It's a powerful form of incitement, too good to skip by troubling themselves with checking the actual facts.
The Israeli victim received emergency medical treatment at the scene and was brought to Tel Hashomer Medical Center in Tel Aviv. Her condition was described as light to moderate in a Magen David Adom bulletin.
We found this security camera footage on an Arab news site (the contents almost certainly originated with an Israeli source):
A 14-year-old Palestinian Arab male was taken into custody at the scene. Yes, 14. Yet another weaponized child. Who says the Palestinian Arab education system produces nothing notable?
Child weaponization by the Palestinian Arab despots of their people's children is a subject that enrages us. That's one reason why we address it so frequently. Click here for some our prior posts on this deplorable and ongoing phenomenon.
[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("Zamienione w broń palestyńskie dzieci") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]
UPDATE Thursday October 10, 2019: The stabber in the video above, the attack near Modi'in, turns out to be all of fifteen. Times of Israel reports today
15-year-old Palestinian indicted for stabbing Israeli woman near Modiin Teen charged with terror offenses for attack at Maccabim Junction on Route 443 last month October 10, 2019 at 2:18 pm | Prosecutors on Thursday indicted a 15-year-old on terror charges for stabbing an Israeli woman near the central city of Modiin last month. According to the indictment, the teenage boy is accused of carrying out a terror attack, illegal possession of a knife and entering Israel illegally. The prosecution has requested that the suspect be detained until the end of legal proceedings. The 22-year-old woman was stabbed on September 25 at the Maccabim Junction along Route 443. She was treated in a hospital for a stab wound to her upper body. Police said a Border Police officer was also lightly hurt while restraining the suspect. According to police, Border Police officers driving on Route 443 spotted the suspect trying to flee and chased after him on foot. The officers fired a number of bullets in the air, and collared the suspect a few hundred meters from the scene of the stabbing.
Honored guests: Family members of jihadist murderers take part in a Jerusalem elementary school ceremony a month ago [From the Facebook page of the Jabel Mukaber school - but taken down once people started talking about it; backgroundhere. ]
We wrote here a few weeks ago ["24-Apr-16: Weaponizing children: Here's one way it's done in Jerusalem"] about the barely-reported, intense and sickening process fostered by the Palestinian Authority to inject hatred and a passion for murder into the minds and lives of the children whose welfare they are charged with protecting.
We see catastrophic Arab education and the Palestinian Arab lust for weaponizing their children as critical factors in the generations-long struggle to establish and protect a Jewish homeland.
There are lots of bad people in the story. They include no shortage of square-headed Israeli bureaucrats whose passivity (which we describe in that post) in the face of this outrageous dimension of Palestinian Arab life helps, perhaps in a small way but surely in a real way, to keep it going. That's unforgivable.
We want to share a moving and meaningful opinion piece published last night and written by the very articulate son of Richard Lakin, a passionate and good man whose life was forfeited to the practitioners of this Arab education process we call catastrophic.
The Anti-Israel Poisoning Starts Young | Palestinian schools honor the killers of my father, a teacher. This would break his heart | Micah Lakin Avni | Wall Street Journal - May 17, 2016
My father, Richard Lakin, a 76-year-old retired elementary-school principal from Connecticut, was on a bus in Jerusalem last October when two young Palestinian men boarded and began shooting and stabbing passengers indiscriminately. Two passengers were killed that awful day and 16 injured, including my father. Despite the efforts of first responders and the nurses and doctors at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital, my father died two weeks later. He had been shot in the head and stabbed multiple times in the head, face, chest and stomach.
Over the past seven months I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand what would cause two educated Palestinian men in their early 20s to board a public bus and butcher a group of innocent civilians, many of them senior citizens. I’m sorry to report that the Palestinian reaction to the attack has led me to believe that the “peace process” is more one-sided than ever.
My father grew up a fighter for civil rights in America. He took those values with him in 1984 when he emigrated to Jerusalem, where he taught English to Arabs and Jews. He was a kind, gentle-hearted man who dedicated his life to education and promoting peaceful coexistence.
Yet Palestinian newspapers praised Baha Alyan, one of the terrorists who murdered my father, as a “martyr and intellectual.” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has met with the families of the attackers and praised them as “martyrs.” A Palestinian scout leader said Baha Alyan, who was shot and killed by a security guard before he could kill more innocent passengers, was “an example for every scout.”
Muhammad Alyan, the father of Baha Alyan, has been invited to speak at Palestinian schools and universities about his son the “martyr.” He recently spoke to children at Jabel Mukaber Elementary School in East Jerusalem, about a half a mile from where my father lived. Tragically, many Palestinian children, perhaps most, are still taught to honor terrorists and fight for the destruction of Israel.
All of this would break my father’s heart. In 2007 he published a book called “Teaching as an Act of Love” summarizing his life’s work and educational philosophy. The message of his book is that every child is a miracle that should be nurtured with love. After Baha Alyan’s father visited Jabel Mukaber Elementary School, I asked school officials if I could come and share my father’s message of peace and coexistence. My offer was rejected.
As long as Palestinian leaders nurture a culture of hate, encouraging school children to go out and kill, more violence is inevitable. By encouraging hatred, they distance all of us from the love and belief in peaceful coexistence for which my father stood.
My father’s book begins with a quote from William Penn: “I expect to pass through life but once. If therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, and not defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again.”
My father lived by those words. If only his murderers had as well.
There are many NGOs active in Israel who loudly declaim co-existence and peace but too-often turn out to be ordinary political activists arguing that it's Israel, only Israel, that needs to be blamed. How constructive it might be if they got behind Micah Avni's cry against the poison being injected daily into the Palestinian Arab bloodstream.
We're thinking of one particular such group, based in Israel but funded (lavishly) mainly by churches, NGOs, governments and other non-Israeli sources, and which has claimed for fifteen years to be making thousands of peace-building presentations annually to Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arab school groups. We make no secret of our feelings of deep disdain (as we explain here) for their fanciful and politically-spun claims.
Still, it's appropriate to call on them now and insist they shine a critical light on the people at Jabel Mukaber Elementary School who rejected Mr Avni's offer to go there and speak of his murdered father's legacy.
While they're considering this, they might also tell us about their experiences talking peace to the Jabel Mukaber children and how that has gone for them - and for the rest of us. Perhaps there is even a teachable moment here.
In Norway, they're in the midst of a very welcome bout of self-criticism, looking critically at the morality and legality of their funding the PA whose appalling Rewards for Terror scheme we have discussed here often. Here's how it has unfolded so far.
Our small role in the expose started three years ago when Arnold Roth was invited to speak to lawmakers in Oslo. Arising from that visit to Norway's parliament and some exposure to its media, there was a video segment on the main Norwegian TV news via which our daughter Malki's face became an evocative symbol of what their unjustified faith in the Abbas regime was wreaking. It's online at http://www.nrk.no/video/PS*106544 (May 14, 2013)
Since then, the opposition have become the government, but not much has changed in relation to the funding scandal despite what appeared to be sincere assurances by politicians - yes, that's a possible oxymoron - back in 2013. The main Norwegian TV station did a follow-up last week, again with Malki's portrait in a central role. Online at http://www.nrk.no/norge/lovet-a-stoppe-stotte---men-palestina-gir-fortsatt-lonn-til-terrorister-1.12912878 (April 24, 2016)
funding of the PA Rewards for Terror scheme - support which continues
until today. Three years, much talk, little progress.
What makes this more than a mere small-town story is that Norway, exceptionally rich because of North Sea oil, has an outsize foreign aid budget amounting to 1.05% of its gross national income in 2015. That's the second-largest percentage among all countries. Beyond that, Norway takes the leading role among European countries in funding the PA. (Note that Norway is not a member of the EU so its funding of Abbas is over and above what the PA gets from Brussels.)
The current state of play is that today's Norwegian government is essentially saying: Yes we know there are some bad things, and even terrorism, that are somehow funded by the foreign aid community. But rest assured, it's not our money, no way, because we are so careful and we make absolutely sure that Norwegian krone only go to pay for Lego sets for little Palestinian babies and never for terrorism. [Actual quote: "Foreign Minister Brende refers to assurances he has been given that the Norwegian money is not used to pay the terrorists."]
The foreign minister is going to meet with Abbas in the next week and says he will impress upon him not to do anything nasty with Norway's gifts.[Actual quote: "Next week Brende scheduled to have a meeting with Mahmoud Abbas. In Wednesday's question time he assured that he will put further pressure on the Palestinian Authority."]
Further pressure certainly sounds good. And how likely is it to fix things? (How do you say "Who cares?" in Norwegian?) That point became clearer to us when, in parliamentary question time this past Wednesday (April 27), the foreign minister, according to a note we received from a Norwegian friend, told a questioner that he plans to yet again ask Abbas to stop the Rewards for Terror schemesalaries. But giving less aid to the PA is something his government will not consider. For a sense of the unfettered evil being done daily by the Mahmoud Abbas PA regime via foreign aid cash, and the devastation this is causing to their society as well as to ours, there's no better or more updated information source than this report published a week ago by PMW. It chronicles the malevolent deceptions of the child-abusing Palestinian Authority as it pulls the wool over stunningly-uncritical Western donor countries' eyes, claiming falsely to have ceased the practice of paying salaries to terrorist prisoners while reaping more than a billion dollars per year. The executive summary version is here.
It's hard not to see donor countries as operating several steps beyond gullible. To our eyes, there seems to be a considerable degree of self-imposed willful ignorance. (Leaving aside the powerful PMW analysis we referenced above, are the Norwegians completely unaware of what the EU's auditors said about the oversight failures of the EU's funding of the Palestinian Arabs? Here's one of several posts we wrote about it.)
Would it be unfair of us to suggest that the legendary "I'm shocked" moment scene - embodied by Claude Rains in the Captain Renault role from "Casablanca" (above) - captures official Norway's see-no-evil stance?
Brief details here of today's Arab-on-Israeli terrorist violence, based on Israel National News' report. There have been three separate attacks so far.
Early Sunday morning, a knife-wielding Arab girl was arrested when she attempted a stabbing attack on security personnel at the Tapuah Junction checkpoint. She is a 17 year old from the Arab village of Qusra. She stood near a bus stop at the junction, evidently waiting for victims. She was fortunately discovered and arrested after brandishing her knife but before causing any life-threatening problems to others.
Later Sunday morning, a 14 year old Arab boy launched a brazen assault on IDF soldiers near Bani Na’im, east of Hebron. The INN report says he opened the door of an IDF jeep and tried to stab the soldiers inside. They overpowered him and took him into custody. He is alive and very, very lucky.
Minutes after that attack, another attempted stabbing, this time direct at Israeli civilians, was launched at an intersection near the town of Huwwara. This third attacker was shot dead at the site (Times of Israel says this it happened at Bitot Junction) before getting close enough to his intended victims to do damage. Palestinian media sources, quoted by Times of Israel, say the attacker, Qusai Diab Abu al-Roub, is 15 years old, a resident of Qabatiya, south of Jenin.
It's unlikely that any one of these attacks, or the three of them taken together, will get much analytic coverage in the media. And neither will the single most disturbing fact about these and many of the attacks that came before them in these past five months of bigoted frenzy: that all of them are the work of children - and of course the men who groom them, incite them, congratulate them and elevate them to the status of heroes.
And at a deeper level - that they are faithfully expressing what their society expects of them and encourages them to do. The conspiracy of silence that accompanies the Palestinian Arab child-abuse industry, the weaponizationof the children living in their villages and towns (but never the children of the insider elite), is the real unreported story.
Does anyone at the Tel-Aviv-based Foreign Press Association have anything to say about this? Their compliance with one of the ugliest aspects of an ugly ongoing pattern of conduct does them and their editors absolutely no credit.
Since then, there have been dozens more stabbings, shootings and car-rammings. Yesterday, there were multiple such attacks. But one of them is in a class of its own. It's the subject of this post.
The photo [in that post] indicates at least one of the attackers is young - to our eyes, 15 or even less. The second attacker is not shown; he was evidently shot and is probably not in good shape. We don't know names, or where they live, or the condition of the one shot... [T]he Light Rail security guard, who was moderately wounded in the attack, managed to fire his weapon toward the two attackers, wounding one according to the police. He received emergency treatment at at the scene and then rushed to Jerusalem's Shaarei Zedek Medical Center. He is about 25, and has stab wounds to the upper body.
A life changing experience for the guard who, thankfully, is said to be doing well today at Shaarei Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem. And the attackers? It may have changed their lives too. Or not.
What we know about them is mundane and not very revealing other than that, on any view, they are children and cousins. Times of Israel says both Moawiyah Alkam and Ali Alkam live in the northern part of Jerusalem, one in Beit Hanina, the other in the Shuafat neighborhood. The one who was shot (according to this source, the younger of the two) received emergency treatment at the scene from Israeli paramedics and was then rushed to Jerusalem's Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital. The initial report had him in serious condition, unconscious and on a ventilator while the second child is evidently unhurt, and held by police after a court order today authorized seven days of detention. The boy who was shot is today described as being in moderate condition. Lucky for him, the medical treatment provided by the Zionists he has been raised to loath is helping to save his life. The Arabic-language social media are, as we have come to expect, completely with the boys. The Hamas-aligned Shehab news agency, based in Gaza, posted an outraged Tweet yesterday [here] with an embedded video clip [here] showing Israeli security personnel vigorously checking one of the two boys for concealed weapons. "Brutal occupation" are the opening words. Another Arabic-language twit says the arrest of the knifers was "barbaric". The atmospherics could hardly be clearer: there was an act of evil, in the eyes of the Arab world, and it was done by the Israelis against the Palestinian Arab boys. No other approach is visible when you look at their news reports and social media. What was on the minds of the young marauders? An Israel National News report says the younger of the attackers, Muawiyyeh Alkam, told police without evident shame that they set out to perform an act of vengeance following the death of another Alkam cousin "who was murdered at Damascus Gate" in their words. That's evidently a reference to Muhammad Saed Ali, 19, another resident of Shuafat, north Jerusalem, who viciously stabbed three Israelis at the entrance to Jerusalem's Old City on October 12, 2015, before being himself stopped and killed by armed security personnel. (We wrote about that here.) And why, it might be asked, does a failed act of attempted murder need to be avenged? Because those attacks are ritually turned on their heads in the Arabic media, with the attackers portrayed as victims, and the victims demonized and presented as usurpers and colonizers. It's a dangerous, immoral and expensive strategy - expensive in terms of Arab lives lost and wasted. The abuse of the Alkam children continues today. One of their uncles, according to Times of Israel, does not believe they were even involved in the attack.
"...I will tell you the truth, we have no faith in the police. We have already seen in other cases, in Hebron and even in Jerusalem, they make up stories and even killed a Jew they suspected of being an Arab,” Sheikh Abdullah Alkam said Tuesday afternoon, referring to the shooting death of a yeshiva student during a confrontation with troops last month. “Maybe they planted a knife on them, I don’t know. We want to first check what happened. I’m their eldest uncle and I was to check everything carefully."
Security camera video shows the children stabbing the security man on board the tram [Source]
But without actually pausing to check a single thing, or to view the video we embedded above, devoted uncle moves quickly into justification mode: as he understands it, the boys and their cohort
see how soldiers act at checkpoints, they see how nice it is in Pisgat Ze’ev and French Hill,” he said, referring to two Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. “And what do they have? There isn’t even a garbage truck. The streets look like hell. A hundred thousand people without normal services living in harsh conditions.”
Which is as good a case as any for sticking knives into security personnel on a fancy and fast tram that brings Palestinian Arabs from their version of hell into the heart of modern Jerusalem.
But it's clear the real hell for them and their uncles is in trying to make sense of modern, open, bustling, prosperous Jerusalem where Arabs are treated more or less like Jews, and where bullet wounds are treated by hospital staff - Jews, Christians, Moslems - who don't give a damn about the political craziness their patients carry around between their ears.
How they cope with this, given what's pumped into them by their social media and newspapers and uncles, is a puzzle.
What does life offer yesterday's child attackers? Very likely the unconditional support of family and community who will stand by them through thick and thin, through criminal charges of attempted murder and terrorism. What comes with that is constant exposure and reinforcement of the sort of message that the poster at the top of this article conveys: the higher purpose of young Arabs is to kell them some Israelis. What that will not include is religious, moral or ethical doubt. If they have encountered doubt so far, it's not evident in their lives or the lives of the other perpetrators of terrorism whose deeds we have examined from a distance.
All this makes for near-impossible relations. How do you make peace with people who hate the very notion?
We know. There are readers who believe there are sober, serious voices among the Palestinian Arabs calling for tolerance, compromise, an end to acts of violence and terror, a better life for their own sons and daughters. Trouble is, as much as we want to hear those voices, they are impossible to find [see "11-May-14: Still searching for outraged moderate Palestinian Arab voices"]. Instead, the length and breadth of their society is infected with messages of hatred, the fabrication of blood libels to ensure even more acts of hatred, a cacophony of perverse calls for more killing, more revenge, more "heroism" of the sort that yesterday's two boys with knives embody.
Police and security personnel lead one of the two Pisgat
Ze'ev knifing attackers away. The second is seriously
injured. [Image: From an eye-witness]
The Jerusalem Light Rail is an easy target for the terror-minded Arabs of Jerusalem and the surrounding neighbourhoods. Rock-hurling attacks have created a constant stream of cracked windows, damaged carriages and shelters. There have been numerous vehicle-rammings aimed at passengers standing at Light Rail stops. Several innocent people have been killed in these attacks.
This afternoon (Tuesday), there are initial reports of a stabbing attack at the Yekutiel Adam station located near the eastern end of the route in the Pisgat Ze'ev neighborhood. Israel National News says
A security guard for the Light Rail has reportedly suffered moderate injuries; Magen David Adom (MDA) medics and security forces are rushing to the scene. Two terrorists - apparently teenagers - carried out the attack; one has been arrested, the other injured after security forces opened fire. [Israel National News, just now]
The photo at right indicates at least one of the attackers is young - to our eyes, 15 or even less. The second attacker is not shown; he was evidently shot and is probably not in good shape. We don't know names, or where they live, or the condition of the one shot. A Reuters reporter tweeted that the two attackers are aged about 12-13. Ynet is reporting the same thing.
Another "victory" for Palestinian Arab education - and quite possibly for UNRWA as well.
Times of Israel says the Light Rail security guard, who was moderately wounded in the attack, managed to fire his weapon toward the two attackers, wounding one according to the police. He received emergency treatment at at the scene and then rushed to Jerusalem's Shaarei Zedek Medical Center. He is about 25, and has stab wounds to the upper body.
The face of children abused: the
Palestinian Arab boy who, with
a friend, launched a stabbing
attack this afternoon on a security
guard on a Jerusalem tram. We think his name is Muawiya Alqam.
UPDATE November 10, 2015: This photo, spotted in the social media, is said to be one of the two attackers. Obviously just a child, and obviously ready to kill himself an Israeli because of ideas planted in his head by figures of authority in his society.
Who might they be? Specific individuals are hard to find or name, except for one: Mahmoud Abbas.
When, as he has done several times in the past two years, whom is Abbas addressing when he stands on some public rostrum and in his capacity as head of Fatah and president of the state of Palestine holds aloft the arms of terrorists, convicted in Israeli courts of acts of murder in the name of Islam or of Islamism or Palestinianism or Pan-Arabism or it hardly matters what, and calls them heroes? When he declares (as he did in December 2013 - source):
"This is the day the joy of all of us the joy of our people for our prisoner heroes who came out today to the light of freedom to live free, we congratulate you and congratulate ourselves with these heroes who arrived here and who arrived in Jerusalem, Gaza, and the rest will come, God willing..."
to whom is he speaking?
To this kid.
UPDATE November 11, 2015: The two weaponized Palestinian Arab children charged with today's stabbing are identified, according to the New York Times ["Violent Loop Engulfs Youths in Jerusalem"]:
Ali Alqam, 12, and Muawiya Alqam, 14, have been arrested, accused of a copycat stabbing that wounded an Israeli security guard on a light railway train in East Jerusalem, not far from their homes in the Shuafat refugee camp and the nearby Palestinian neighborhood of Beit Hanina.
The aged, wealthy, failed, murder-minded leaders of the Mahmoud Abbas-led Palestinian Authority must be so proud.
"There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children."
Nelson Mandela 1918-2013, addressing the launch of the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund, Pretoria, South Africa, May 8, 1995 [source]
Hamas, which more closely resembles a death cult than a functioning government, organized a rally this past Friday night in Rafah, Gaza Strip. If a picture is worth a thousand words, these representative photos below, published originally in Arabic-language channels and not (yet) syndicated by the major news agency names, sum up the self-inflicted tragedy of the Palestinian Arabs.
They also highlight the hypocrisy of those who ignore the evidence in front of their faces in the rush to embrace the Islamists and their "struggle" to "resist". So does the utter silence emanating from the many child-protection agencies around the world who published heart-rending images of under-nourished or war-impacted or genitally-mutilated children (as they should) but will not touch the rampant, highly public child abuse that is a daily reality in the world of the jihadists, and in particular the dark netherworld of Hamas. What they have done to their children is beyond forgiveness,
Now bear in mind as you glance at them what's going on in the late Nelson Mandela's homeland the last few days:
Khaled Mashal, Hamas' political leader since 2004, was invited to participate in a conference of South Africa's ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), and will meet South African President Jacob Zuma. ANC said the conference will discuss "Palestinian identity issues, in addition to an independent, sovereign Palestinian state, free from Israeli occupation." [Xinhua, October 19, 2015]
The ANC released a number of tweets chronicling the meeting between Hamas leader Khaled Mashal and the South African president and a press conference that followed. Photos shared by the ANC showed South African leaders exchanging gifts with Mashal as well as the signing of a letter of intent for the two governments to build a lasting relationship. Many of the tweets expressed solidarity with Palestine. One quoted South African politician Gwede Mantashe saying, "we will call on all progressive countries to support the cause of the Palestinian people." Another tweet said that the "ANC is always on the side of the oppressed. Hence we support Palestine and Western Sahara." [i24news, October 19, 2015]
No immediate word on how firmly the ANC stands behind children with daggers or the adults who put them there. Or whether they subscribe, as Hamas does, to the uplifting value of viciously murdering unarmed Jews and other Israelis as part of its efforts to “free Al-Aqsa”.
The source of the photos of knife-clutching children below, all taken on Friday October 16, 2015 at a Hamas event on the streets of Rafah in the Gaza Strip, is Donia Al-Watan, a Palestinian Arab website that describes itself as "the first electronic Palestinian newspaper concerned with Palestinian affairs, along with the regional and global news... [and] classified as one of the most Arabic websites that enhance democracy."
Child victim
Child victim
Child victim
Adult role model
Universal Children's Daytakes place on November 20, exactly a
month from today. The annual event was initiated by the UN General
Assembly in 1954 as a way of encouraging states to "to promote mutual
exchange and understanding among children" and similar blah blah. But
also "to initiate action to benefit and promote the welfare of
the world's children", a noble and concrete goal that seems
as far away from being achieved today as it ever was in the past. We don't say
that the vicious and violent grip that Hamas has on the children on the Gaza
Strip can be reversed by concerted action by the world's nations. That would be
asking for too much, and it isn't going to happen. But that they remainutterly silentin the face of the murder-centric
child abuse that goes on in front of the cameras daily and nightly in the
Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip - that's beyond unconscionable.
Malchei Yisrael Street, Geula, Jerusalem - aftermath of this morning's
murderous car-ramming of people standing innocently at a bus stop
It's been an incredibly stressful day here in Jerusalem, and throughout Israel.
Strikingly, four major attacks - and they were by no means all of today's attacks - took place at almost the exact same moment this morning.
All have been widely reported so we will not delve into details, and the smartphone videos of Palestinian Arabs engaged in terror have been posted and seen by those who can bear to look at them.
Videos like this one (be warned - it's explicit and very clear) of Alaa Abu Jamal, an East Jerusalem Arab employed as a service technician by Bezeq, Israel's dominant telecoms company, driving a work-supplied Bezeq-logo'ed van that he crashes deliberately at murderously high speed directly into a small group of Israelis standing at a bus stop on Jerusalem's busy Malchei Yisrael Street. And then, emerging from his smashed vehicle, he slashes furiously - with a meat cleaver - at an injured Jew lying prone on the ground, killing him, before being shot by a passing armed security man. It's all on the video. One of his victims - Rabbi Yeshayahu Krishevsky, 60 - died in the remorseless attack and was buried this afternoon. Several more are seriously injured. The principal attacker, Abu Jamal (who will doubtless be termed "lone wolf" in parts of the media who avert their gaze when non-stop PA incitement to kill is shown) is now dead.
UPDATE February 4, 2016: File this enraging comment away for when the know-nothing reporters and editors of Big Media next serve up a portion of "Abbas the moderate" counter-factual nonsense: "Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday hosted the families of Palestinian terrorists involved in Jerusalem attacks, just hours after three Palestinians killed an Israeli Border Police officer and injured a second in Jerusalem. Abbas met with the families of 11 terrorists in Ramallah who carried out attacks against Israelis in the past four months and whose bodies remain in Israeli custody, Ynet reported... Also present were the relatives of Alaa Abu Jamal, also of Jebel Mukkaber, who in October careened his car into Israeli pedestrians, exited the vehicle and stabbed the victims. The families of the terrorists called upon Abbas to act to secure the release of their bodies from Israel. Abbas said that the Palestinian leadership is making great efforts to do so in order to ease the pain for the families. “Your sons are martyrs,” the Palestinian Authority president told the families. [Source: Times of Israel]
And like this one of the aftermath of an assault on the city's Egged 78 bus in Jerusalem's Armon Hanatziv (Governor's Mansion) neighborhood. Two victims are dead; 16 are injured, some of them very seriously. This was an attack in which the outcome could have easily been much, much worse: the goal of the two terrorists, one armed with a gun and the other with a knife, was evidently to take control of the bus by force and use it to do even more serious harm.
One terrorist is Baha Aliyan, 22, from Jabel Mukaber. The second is Bilal Ghanem, from the same neighborhood, an "activist" in the Islamist Bloc at Al-Quds University who had a record as a Hamas terrorist [source] and was released from 14 months imprisonment just a year ago [source - Arabic]. Tom Gross, the distinguished media analyst who follows the Al-Quds school closely (it has a violent and hateful history) points out in a despatch today that the university's Fatah student faction published a tribute to the dead killer in Arabic on a university-affiliated website: our translation of the Arabic
جامعة القدس تزف شهيدها الثالث احد منفذي عملية اطلاق النار اليوم في
الباص في مدينة القدس الشهيد بلال غانم ...
makes plain that (no surprise here) the students call their former colleague a martyr. Such is the deplorable value system of the better-educated of the Palestinian Arabs. (Fatah's head is the current PA president, Abu Mazen or Mahmoud Abbas.)
The two murder-minded jihadists boarded an Egged bus on Olei HaGardom Street in East Talpiot, a neighborhood also known as Armon HaNetziv. According to Ynet:
They started shooting and stabbing passengers while the bus kept moving, killing a man in his 60s and wounding 10 others. One of the wounded, a man in his 40s, was evacuated in critical condition and was declared dead at the hospital. Two others were seriously wounded - women aged around 60 and 40, who suffered stab wounds to their upper body. Two others were in moderate condition: a woman of about 60 years old with gunshot wounds to her upper body and a man in his 30s. Three were lightly wounded, and two were suffering from shock.
Today's other two major attacks were both in Ra'anana, a Tel Aviv suburb that has so far largely escaped acts of Arab terror. One was a walk-up stabbing (the perpetrator traveled from East Jerusalem for his moment in the sun) at a bus stop in Ra'anana's commercial center. One of the victims is badly injured; two others with light-to-moderate injuries. The second, again in a busy part of the city, resulted in six Israelis being injured, one seriously. The attacker is alive but in a bad way.
It's got to be observed that (a) all of today's perpetrators are the holders of Israeli identity papers; and (b) many of the Palestinian Arab stabbings of the past two weeks here in Israel have been the work of murder-minded children and teenagers.
For those who see this as a statistical blip, an issue of interest only to friends of Israel, or a matter of no particular significance (many of the reporters and editors in the mainstream media, in particular), we have nothing to say.
But for reasonably intelligent observers, it's evident that a web of interlocking influencers within the PA and Hamas regime governments - their civil services (such as they are), their mosques and youth groups and schools - has been and continues to be involved in churning out battle-field-ready young people, boys and girls, their heads filled with visions of glory and a readiness - even a passion - for death.
What is the regime of Mahmoud Abbas, the highly-immoderate, allegedly "moderate" PA leader about whom we have nothing good to say, doing about it? Let's be clear: he's encouraging it, and facilitating it via overt incitement of the most barbaric kind.
The video above [translated from Arabic by Palestinian Media Watch] captures a fire-and-brimstone, rally-the-thugs speech given by the normally phlegmatic Abbas less than a month ago. It ran on official PA TV and was also posted to his personal website. It's a personal message, an official call to the masses, and it's entirely devoted to precisely the cause that is on the lips of the stabbers, the shooters, the car-rammers, the rock hurlers and the firebombers: the ancient and renewed capital of the State of Israel, Jerusalem, and the holiest site in Jewish life, the Temple Mount:
"We bless you [referring to those carrying out Ribat, the pursuit of religious conflict and/or war to protect land claimed to be Islamic), we bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah, Allah willing. Every martyr (shahid) will reach paradise, and everyone wounded will be rewarded by Allah. The Al-Aqsa [mosque] is ours, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is ours, and they [the Israelis, the Jews] have no right to defile them with their filthy feet. We will not allow them to, and we will do everything in our power to protect Jerusalem." [PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, September 16, 2015]
Yes: Every drop of blood.
Now if you were a callow teenage boy or girl of 13, 14, 15, and getting bombarded in the mosque and at school and on the street where you hang with your friends, always, always about Jerusalem and its sacred state - and then the president comes along and promises you paradise and a reward from Heaven, and a free pass to do whatever harm to the Jews that you can imagine, wouldn't your mother's largest kitchen knife be the very next you go looking for?
If any of Abbas adviser's are reading this, and want to deny the claim, they're invited to please send us written evidence of the PA president's calls to his people to stop their blood-lusting violence, their overt and cold-blooded weaponization of their society's children, and their hunting for defenceless, civilian Israelis at bus stops, tram stops and shopping precincts.
And for any Europeans reading this - congratulations! None of this could have happened without the tax money you pay to your governments who in turn send millions of Euros to Ramallah to enable Abbas and his henchmen to get away with murder.
Bassem Tamimi visits an upstate NY school class to address
8 year old children on the Palestinian Arab view of the Arab vs
Israel conflict; gets warm reception from local political
activist [Background]
Amnesty is pushing back in classic Amnesty fashion after a small storm erupted in the wake of the abhorrent Bassem Tamimi's official visit to a Grade 3 school class in Ithaca NY. There's some background:to the ruckus in Washington Free Beacon,Legal Insurrection, and via the contemporary historian Petra Marquardt-Bigman who has written several well-researched pieces on the Tamimi clan and what makes it so (ahem) special. There's also a published apology to parentsfrom the Ithaca school district superintendent in the wake of the Tamimi visit.
Mr. Tamimi's goal must have seemed innocent enough - for someone as deeply dedicated as he to providing camouflage for murderous terrorism. He was there, in a program funded and organized (disgracefully) by Amnesty International and a small raft of off-the-edge extremist grouplets [see "13-Sep-15: A roadshow and its groupies"] to initiate the upstate NY town's eight year olds (a demographic for which Mr Tamimi has a demonstrated passion) into the secret arts of resistance and their bizarre brand of non-violence. We can only speculate that whoever had the idea of putting him in front of impressionable children must really believe the man from Nabi Saleh in the hills north of Jerusalem is an expert source of best practices in elementary school messaging.
Whatever, like many in the dark netherworld of Palestinian Arab violence, terror and cynical abuse of their own communities, Bassem Tamimi has demonstrated that he's adept at squeezing the most out of children. Also highly relevant (though concealed from view, at least for those not wanting to see): the Tamimis of Nabi Saleh have murdered a startling number of innocent victims. Most of their victims were, of course, Jewish.
Amnesty's "Country Specialist - Israel/OPT/State of Palestine", Edith "Edie" Garwood, published a press release on Monday which we have just spotted. Backed by the full power and credibility of the global Amnesty enterprise and its astonishing $94M annual budget, it's subtly entitled "Beverly J. Martin Elementary School receives undeserved backlash".
Campaigning: Bassem Tamimi and local activist exchange views
on "resistance" with Grade 3 scholars in Ithaca classroom [Background]
(NGO-Monitor has a detailed dossier on Amnesty International, an organization that began nearly half a century ago with fine principles but which has lost its way - and its moral compass - in serious fashion. There's also some relevant background on Amnesty's Country Specialisthere.)
In a note published on the extreme-left Kibush website, the Amnesty functionary writes that the 'rights'-group's pushback is being published
in response to a smear campaign and some bad publicity surrounding an event during Bassem Tamimi’s US speaking tour. Amnesty International USA is one of a coalition of groups sponsoring the tour. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are future attacks or challenges during the remaining stops of his tour as his village of Nabi Saleh is starting to get the attention of international media and there are some who don’t like it. [The added bolding is ours.]
Tamimi is in the Bay Area today, moving on to several other California towns, then back to Boston and Washington at the end of 6 maximum-impact weeks. More details here: "29-Sep-15: In the Bay Area? Boston? Washington DC? Help us claim back the real meaning of human rights". We hope people with a genuine regard for human rights (that's rights without quotation marks - there are such things) will take the opportunity to protest the abusive misuse of Amnesty's public standing and help to expose the hatefulness on show when Tamimi is given a platform.
Finally, not for the first time, we repeat yet again the so-far ignored questions we began posing some weeks ago ["04-Sep-15: Mr. Human Rights Defender, a question if we may"] to Tamimi and his handlers, who have so far avoided answering them:
Bassem Tamimi, tell us in simple words: are you as delighted by your cousin Ahlam Tamimi's massacre of Jewish children as she is? Have you criticized it ever, anywhere? Will you condemn it here and now?
Perhaps some kind reporters, or attendees at the Tamimi worship sessions, might ask on our behalf, and let us know the response. (To be candid, we're not holding our breaths.) The massacre we mention is described here. It's where the life of our precious fifteen year-old daughter Malki ended. Bassem Tamimi and the mother of his abused children are the stuff of our nightmares. If people understood them better, they would probably have the same problem we do.
Beloved daughter of Nabi Saleh, and kinswoman/cousin to Bassem Tamimi,
this woman - Ahlam Tamimi, murderer of our child - planned and executed
the massacre at a Jerusalem pizzeria. We know how she feels about what
she did. How do the Tamimi roadshow sponsors feel?
We're waiting to hear. [Image Source]
Bassem Tamimi, about whom we have written several times in the past month, is in Chicago as we write this. He is in the first week of what is being billed by its promoters as a "month long spring 2015 U.S. speaking tour",
This will seem slightly odd to Americans accustomed to decidedly-non-spring weather in September and October. But that's how it is with spinners of myths and fabrications like the Tamimis of Nabi Saleh. You can believe your eyes. Or you can swallow their version of the truth. You can't do both.
UPDATE Sunday morning, September 13, 2015: "Spring" has now been silently removed from their web page. Echoes of it still appear on websites that republished the original Bassem Tamimi Roadshow flyer, like thisand this and in the Google Search result below.
Why the Tamimi roadshow was pushed back from Spring 2015 until now is anyone's guess. We can only marvel (in a distinctly non-admiring way) at the cold and calculating manner in which they engineered a viral video and matching news event - both starring underage children deliberately placed by their parents in harm's way - to give the tour some media push. These are special people in the decidedly malevolent sense of the word.
It's tremendously hard for us, as the parents of a child murdered in an attack on a pizzeria led by a Tamimi woman from his village - a woman whose killings are openly celebrated by that village and honored by the Bassem Tamimi family [here] - to know of the many public gatherings that have been organized to provide Bassem Tamimi with platforms.
It's hard as well to see how the grotesque passion of that Nabi Saleh daughter to seek the greatest possible number of Jewish children as her victims keeps getting swept under the rug by the Tamimi clan, aided and abetted by their rabid promoters and by parts of the news reporting industry.
So please don't ask any more why it galls us so much to hear Bassem Tamimi described (as the road-show website does) as a man who will "speak about his village’s work for freedom and justice". This is beyond fraud. It's complicity.
Then there's the matter of the sanctimonious, slogan-spouting sponsors who are making his encounter with open-minded Americans possible. Let's take a moment to look at them. And to see if there's anything a fair-minded person can learn about them for future reference.
We started by looking at the sponsor list from that website. Then we turned to published information gathered by NGO Monitor which does uncompromisingly professional work focused on exposing whose charity and whose tithe money is applied towards funding extremist political causes. The result: we hereby name, and sincerely hope to shame, the groups on the list below. Please help us do that. These people are getting away with murder. Every one of them is complicit in the stage-managed burnishing of the career path of a petty Palestinian bureaucrat (Bassem Tamimi's daily work allegedly involves issuing visas for the famously make-work Fatah-controlled regime in Ramallah where everyone whom the regime favours gets paid work) and of his home town, Nabi Saleh, a village whose population - essentially one big family - and its heroes are dedicated to the efficacy of murder in achieving goals that most decent people would be shocked to know.
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) calls itself the “Jewish wing” of the Palestinian solidarity movement and seeks to “end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem.” Its executive director Rebecca Vilkomerson helpfully explains that JVP's strategy is to create “a wedge” within the American Jewish community over support for Israel, while working toward the goal of eliminating U.S. economic, military, and political aid. When people speak of radical splinter groups whose viewpoints usually begin with the highly misleading words "as a Jew", JVP is probably on the list of people whom they have in mind.
Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA): Its mission statement describes this church group as an “ecumenical grassroots liberation theology movement among Palestinian Christians” which “encourages Christians from around the world to work for justice and to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people.” Promoting “liberation theology,” the group claims that Palestinians represent a modern-day version of Jesus’ suffering. This includes deicide imagery, and supercessionist rhetoric used to demonize Israel and Judaism.
Amnesty Internationalclaims to be a “worldwide movement of people who campaign for internationally recognized human rights for all” But friends of Israel have long been aware that Amnesty's stance is odd, inconsistent, and tainted by deeply political anti-Israel considerations. The organization disproportionately singles out Israel for condemnation, focusing solely on the conflict with the Palestinian Arabs, misrepresenting the complexity of the conflict, and ignoring more severe human rights violations in the region. It also distorts international law, routinely misusing terms like “collective punishment,” “occupying power,” and “disproportionate” in its condemnations of Israel’s Gaza policy. To our great chagrin and puzzlement, it has been providing a megaphone for Bassem Tamimi for years, along with his family business and a cast of blood-lusting Tamimis, without even once drilling down into the culture of violence and hatred that characterizes his clan and his town.
U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation is a major proponent of BDS, billing itself as “A national coalition of more than 400 groups,” working “to end U.S. support for Israel's occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.”
Palestinian American Congress Southern California – The Palestinian American Congress (PAC) does not maintain a regular website. Its Facebook account is openly hostile towards Israel, compares Israel with ISIS and calls for anti-Israel boycotts.
Veterans for Peace protests against all U.S. military operations and interventions. Its mission is “educating the public, advocating for a dismantling of the war economy, providing services that assist veterans and victims of war, and most significantly, working to end all wars.”
Fellowship of Reconciliation: Claiming to promote reconciliation among various ethnic, national and religious groups, it is aligned with those extremists who seek to advance boycotts of anything Israeli.
Dorothy Cotton Institute purports to prepare and educate leaders for “a global human rights movement”, but NGO Monitor's research points to their adoption of anti-Israel "apartheid" rhetoric as well as support for BDS. When activists from DCI speak out for the rights of murdered children like our Malki, and against those who celebrate such killings - the Tamimi clan among them - we will be ready to take a more charitable view.
Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA)– The group’s stated goal is to “educate North Americans about children in the region and the brutal impact of US foreign policy on their lives.” According to the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) website, “[t]he Middle East Children’s Alliance is the fiscal sponsor for ISM-USA.” Donations for ISM’s campaign to “interfere with the construction of the annexation barrier” can be made to “MECA (ISM-USA Fund).”
Episcopal Peace Fellowship: Another group of self-described Christians who say they "seek a deliberate response to injustice and violence and want to pray, study and take action for justice and peace in our communities, our church, and the world. We are called to do justice, dismantle violence, and strive to be peace makers". They urge BDS as the way to achieve this for "the people of Palestine and Israel” But it is plain that they are oblivious to the violence-loving creed of Mr and Mrs Bassem Tamimi, which - given that they are among the sponsors of the roadshow - is a disgrace to them and their values.
And the improbably named Vegans Against the Occupation: NGO Monitor notes that "a significant portion of the group’s website is devoted to vegan recipes". This may be a good thing. But its members might want to call for an audit in view of the funds they are throwing at the Tamimi platform.
Without dwelling on the matter, it's impossible for people of goodwill not to notice the prominent role played by groups asserting a Christian viewpoint. That's a deeply troubling aspect we plan to come back to in an upcoming post. It's also clear that the vast problems of the Arab world, and of the Palestinian Arabs in particular - corruption, child abuse, the glorification of child-killing, the open abuse of women, the uncritical embrace of so-called honor killings of wives, sisters and daughters - all somehow slip by these people. (We expand on some of this in a previous post: "22-Apr-14: Attention World Council of Churches: Will you now follow your own advice and speak up for the Arabs tortured and imprisoned by the PA?") It's inescapable: there's something about the Jews that somehow gets their total focus.
The remaining sponsors are a grab-bag of small and large action groups who either claim to promote peace (by including it in their names) or are single-issue apologists for one or another of the bickering Palestinian factions: Massachusetts Peace Action, Alliance for a Secular and
Democratic South Asia, Boston Coalition for Palestinian Rights, Palestinian House of New England, Students for Justice in Palestine. If we skipped anyone, we apologize. We really do intend for your dishonesty and/or myopia to become much better known.
Bassem Tamimi, tell us in simple words: are you as delighted by your cousin Ahlam Tamimi's massacre of Jewish children as she is? Have you criticized it ever, anywhere? Will you condemn it here and now?
(The massacre we mention is described here. It's where the life of our precious fifteen year-old daughter Malki ended.)
